


My Heart Blows Wild

by Griftings



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dramedy, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, kind of, tattoo/florist au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-05-22 17:09:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6087757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Griftings/pseuds/Griftings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When Vex thinks of a mechanic, she typically thinks of a larger, muscley guy in overalls who's probably already got some tattoos and has grease smeared on his face, and who looks like he could fuck somebody up.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>When Vex thinks of a guy named Percy, she typically thinks of a skinny, lily-white prep school boy who's allergic to everything and who bruises like a week-old peach.</i>
</p>
<p> <i>Percival de Rolo, she finds, is somewhere between a mix of the two.</i></p>
<p>Or, the one where Vex is nearly a tattoo artist, Percy is not quite a mechanic, Vax works in a florist's shop, and Keyleth is a florist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally supposed to be like a 3k crack oneshot. about 400 words in, it lost the crack. about 500 words in it grew a plot. i hate it when this happens.

It all starts when Vex's car breaks down.

It's two in the morning, and she's on her way back to the apartment from a party a town away that a more responsible person of her age probably wouldn't have gone to, and her car starts making chugging and spitting noises. She slows and pulls off to the side of the road just in time for the engine to cut out, saying softly but feelingly, "Oh, _shit_." She throws it into park and twists the key in the ignition, but the engine doesn't even turn over. There's only a soft clicking sound.

After a few seconds the dashboard lights blink out, and she's cast into darkness.

And see, here's the thing; she's been expecting it, she can't act surprised, and she's got no one to blame for it but herself. _Get your car fixed, sister_ , she can hear Vax saying in her head, _just bite the bullet and spend the money to have it done so you can put it behind you._

"Shit," she says again, pulling her coat on and getting out of the car. 

She pops the hood and then just stares into the bowels of the engine helplessly. She thinks it was the catalytic converter that Percy said needed replacing? Or possibly the oil well. Maybe both. All she knows is that between the two of them, she and her brother have been nursing this car along for a couple months, and it's given them trouble before, but it's always been when trying to crank it at start-up and not in the middle of the fucking night on the side of the road in the ass-end of nowhere in winter.

Vex stares at everything for another few seconds, then stomps back to the driver's side door, throws herself into the seat, and slams it shut behind her. Then she bonks her head against the steering wheel a couple times.

Her first instinct is to call her brother, of course. He'd make fun of her ruthlessly and probably bitch the entire drive back home, but he'd wake up from a dead sleep and come get her no questions asked to do it. And in fact, she's already typed in his number and is about to hit the call button before she remembers that it's a weeknight; he's got work in the morning.

Vex blinks down at her phone screen, the light harsh in the darkness of the car, then backs out to the contact list.

Vax would come get her, yeah, but she's at least an hour away from home which would make it _at least_ two hours to get her and get back, so best case scenario he'd be going in to work dead tired and worst case scenario he'd have to call out entirely. She knows he hasn't had the job long enough to do that and get away with it, and besides, he's been so _excited_ about it, so happy to get back out into the world.

A step in the right direction, Kimah had called it, her voice proud, and Vex knows the parole officer doesn't hand out praise easily.

No. No, she can't mess this up for him. He might get mad or feel guilty about it, but she won't let him fuck this up because of her.

Her second instinct is to call Pike, because if anyone else would come get Vex without complaining, it would be her, and it's as she's scrolling through her contacts that she remembers _fuck_ Pike just switched over to night shift at the hospital, didn't she? She's probably still at work right now.

Vex bangs her head a few more times and resists the urge to throw her phone out the window. She settles for tossing it in the passenger's seat, then rests her cheek against the middle of the wheel (the horn hasn't worked for several months now, so she's not worried about that) and lets herself feel shitty for a minute or so before she scoops it back up.

Her contact list is still open and scrolled down through the P's, and above Pike's name she sees Percy's. She pauses.

In truth, Percy probably wouldn't have been her third choice, either; that would likely have been Tiberius, if Tiberius hadn't fucked off back to his parents halfway across the country. It's not that she doesn't like Percy, it's just... she doesn't really know him that well. Not well enough for him to likely want to jump out of bed and come get her dumb ass out of the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere. Hell, even _Scanlan_ would probably be more amiable about it, if he thought he could get something out of it.

But she hasn't really known Percy that long. She's not even sure if she could say they were friends. More like... acquaintances. But if anyone were likely to be awake at this time of night, it'd probably be him.

Vex cocks her head in thought, and then presses dial.

It rings exactly three times, and then the call connects and on the other side of the line a masculine voice says, "Hello? Vex?"

"Percival," she says cheerfully, trying to sound like she's not shivering in a dark car on the side of the road at two in the morning. "How are you, darling?"

There's a long moment of silence, and then Percy gives a little sigh. Vex can already picture him rubbing at his eyes. "Well, I'm certainly not sleeping, am I?" he asks, but it somehow comes out as amicable instead of sarcastic. "And how are you this fine winter morning?"

 _Freezing my tits off,_ Vex thinks. "Just peachy," she says. "Though I might have run into a slight problem."

Still as cool as a cucumber, Percy says, "Least me guess, your car broke down."

She winces and runs a hand through her hair. "Ah... perhaps. How'd you guess?"

"Well," he says, voice a tad bit louder now, like he's tucked his phone into his shoulder and his mouth is closer to the receiver. Vex can hear rustling in the background, the sound of papers sliding against each other. "I distinctly remember telling you that you needed to get that catalytic converter replaced as soon as possible, or your car might explode."

Ah, so it _was_ the catalytic converter. Well at least she got that right.

"Yes. Well." And then she falls silent, because there isn't much she can say to that.

A few moments pass, and Percy sighs again. "I'm going to take another shot at guessing and say that you need a ride?"

"That would be a bullseye. I'm not, ah, interrupting anything, am I? You weren't sleeping?"

"Would it have mattered?" he laughs, and now Vex can hear the jingling of keys. "Where are you?"

Vex looks out the window, slightly fogged from her breath, into the darkness of the woods around her. "Somewhere in Hell," she says, exiting the car to walk around to the trunk and get her kit out so she has it ready to go. Percy laughs louder.

"Trust me," he murmurs into the phone on a chuckle, "I know all about that."

\-------

Here is what Vex knows about Percy:

She knows that he's kind of quiet, that he's equal parts sweet and caustic depending on the mood he's in, and that he comes from a family  
that Tiberius would call "old money" and that Vax would call "rich as balls."

She knows that he's the kind of person who looks perpetually startled, that he has at least a partial education in law, and that he can occasionally be persuaded to barter mechanical services for tattoos (or at least, that's how she got him to diagnose her car).

She knows that Vax vouches for him, that they met in group counseling, and that he's apparently willing to drive an hour out of town to pick up a friend's sister who he's only met three or four times.

She knows, even with as few times as she's been around him, that he's the kind of person who she could really see herself liking.

And she knows that he's hiding something.

\-------

Percy's old beater truck passes hers on the road about fifty minutes later, and by the time she's clambered out, pulling her coat tight against herself and trembling so hard her teeth are chattering, he's done a three-point turn and pulled up alongside her.

"H-hey, sailor," she greets when he rolls the passenger's side window down, breath puffing out visibly in front of her. "Give a g-girl a ride?"

"My god, woman," he says, sounding genuinely concerned, "get inside, it's freezing out here."

Vex doesn't have to be told twice. She's opening the door, hefting her kit up under her arm, even as the window is sliding back up, and immediately upon sitting in the passenger's seat she peels off her gloves to press her fingers against the air vent, sighing in delight at the warm air that blows against them. When she finally looks over at him, Percy looks about the same as he has every time she's seen him; white hair tussled, blue eyes wide behind his glasses, and lips that would naturally turn up into a smile pulled down into a frown.

"What in God's name are you doing way out here, anyway?" he asks, but before she can answer he's already thrown his truck into park and is climbing out, shutting the door behind him. She rolls her eyes and watches as he shuffles around to the front of her car, and takes a pocket flashlight between his teeth to start fiddling with things under the hood. After a minute or so of this he comes back to her side and she rolls down the window just enough for them to talk, having spent almost an hour sitting in a car with no heat and not willing to lose any warmth now that she has it.

" _So,_ " he says, in a mild way that nonetheless makes her stomach drop instantly the way only teachers, doctors, and mechanics have ever been able to accomplish, "The good news is that I think it's your battery, which I can jump, and not your catalytic converter, which obviously I can't help you with. The bad news is that I checked your oil, and it's absurdly low considering I remember checking it _last time_ I saw you as well, which means you likely have an oil leak, which means if you continue driving it then you're essentially, ah." He seems to consider his words for a moment, and then finishes with, "Fucked."

Vex groans and drops her head into her hands, which is lovely actually because her nose was really cold too and could probably use a defrost.

Percy disappears back into her car and she rolls the window up without looking, determined to blame the stinging in her eyes on the cold bite to the air.

God, she just can't catch a fucking break, can she? She's stronger than this, she knows she is, it's just--

God. _God._ This last year has just been so _hard._

After another minute or so the driver's side door opens and shuts again as Percy slides back into his seat. Vex swallows hard and wipes her nose, but if Percy notices he doesn't comment on it. She glances over to her car to see that he's shut a plastic grocery bag that's been rattling around her passenger floorboard for weeks into the driver's-side door.

When she looks back at him, he shrugs a little sheepishly. "I didn't think to bring a towel and I didn't want to go digging around in your stuff. I locked it up, we can call a tow truck tomorrow."

The 'we' comment makes her remember that Percy's awake at nearly three in the morning to come get her ass out of hot water. With a sigh she rakes a hand through her hair and tosses it over her shoulder, turning to look at him and nervously biting her lip. "Listen, I really appreciate you coming to help me out. It's... really awesome of you, Percy."

He smiles a little, gives a slight nod as if to say _yeah, I know._

"It's fine. I wasn't asleep anyway. Besides," he continues, pulling back onto the road and turning his high beams on, "Vax would kill me if he found out I knew you needed help and just left you stranded out here."

Vex rolls her eyes again but can't help the grin that brings. "Yeah, he would. Though he'd probably kill me too, just on principal, so."

There's a few minutes of companionable silence, the kind Vex doesn't get to have with a lot of people. Percy's just like that, she thinks; he doesn't mince words. Vex can appreciate that. She's good at talking her way out of trouble, but has never had much in the way of patience for needless small talk.

She likes that Percy seems to understand that.

Still, she's not surprised when, a couple miles down the road, he asks again, "But really, Vex. What were you doing so far from home in a rattling metal death trap?"

She shrugs, draws her coat in against herself a bit. It's not quite a nervous tic, but she can't blame it on the cold because by now it's actually quite toasty in his truck. "There was a party." Out of the corner of her eye she can see Percy's eyebrows raise and he blinks a few times, but doesn't react beyond that. She drums her fingers against the plastic case of her kit. "I heard about it from one of my friends in the area, just a bunch of drunk college kids. Thought I might see if any of them wanted some ink, maybe make some money on the side."

Percy lets out a soft hum, brows raising even higher. "A party, hmm? Seems a bit... unhygienic."

It's bland, nonjudgmental. Diplomatic as fuck.

It rankles her.

"Yeah well," she says, a bit testily, just on this side of snapping. She's couldn't say that he looks pissed off, exactly, but the tilt of his mouth lends to an expression of mild disapproval. "We have to earn a living somehow, right?"

He glances over to her now, then down to the kit in her lap. She wraps her arms around it protectively. "Yes," he says finally. "I suppose we must."

This time the silence is a bit tense, a bit awkward. Vex isn't sure if it's entirely on her end or not, since Percy is now looking straight ahead again, hands firmly at ten and two.

After a few minutes pass he speaks again. "Well? Did you make enough money for it to be worth it?"

Vex rests her head against the window and stares out into the darkness, watching the dimly-lit trees flashing by, and says nothing.

\-------

(Did Vex tell you that she does tattoos?

Well, she does tattoos.

She's not a professional or anything, but she's great with calligraphy and she's trying to branch out into more artsy designs, and pretty much all of her friends have something by her somewhere.

The first time she'd met Percy, they'd bartered a service for a service; she'd give him a tattoo if he'd check out her car for free.

The issue that she runs into is that she's not licensed.)

\-------

((Once, when Vex was a child, she woke up in the middle of a night from a nightmare.

Vax was going through a phase where he didn't want to be twins anymore and so he'd demanded his own room. It wasn't going well for either of them, but Vax was determined to be strong without his sister and Vex was determined to be spiteful to her brother and so the two of them slept in separate rooms even though neither of them was happy.

Anyway, Vax's room was too far for her to walk to-- she was young and scared and besides, Vax was only a little bit older than her and not all that much taller and she didn't need him to protect her anyway.

So she went searching for her mother.

She found her in the kitchen, sitting at the table with her head in her hands and her shoulders bent. It was a position Vex was familiar with: it was the Balancing The Checkbook position. She knew better than to bother her mother when she was Balancing The Checkbook, because her mother had to concentrate. Numbers were difficult, she knew from school, especially when you weren't given the right ones to add up to how much you were supposed to have. But Vex had a nightmare, and Vax was mean.

"Mama?" she'd said, tiny and nervous. Her mother's head had lifted up and Vex could see tears in her eyes. "I had a nightmare."

Her mother had sort of swiped at her face for a moment, but her voice had been strong when she'd said, "Oh, come here, darling. I've got you."

And Vex had climbed into her mother's lap and stared up at her. "Why are you sad?"

And her mother had pushed the papers and envelopes and letters with numbers on them into a pile and across the table and said, "Don't you worry about it, my darling, don't worry. I've got you."

(Vex worried.)))

\-------

After a good bit of time passes, the tension seems to fade. It's difficult to stay annoyed at someone who isn't giving you any ammo, and Percy doesn't seem much inclined to actually argue.

"So not that I mind helping a friend," he says, after they've gone ten or so minutes down the road in silence, "but why call me and not Vax? He seems the more logical choice."

Vex, a little thrown by the fact that Percy honestly considers them friends, clears her throat and shrugs. "He has to get up for work in a few hours. I didn't want him to be exhausted, or God forbid have to call out entirely."

"I might have work in the morning," he says mildly, but when she twists to look at him he's smiling. "You never know. I might have to call out myself now. Thanks, Vex."

She rolls her eyes and turns towards him fully, elbow against the passenger door. "Firstly, when I called you, you told me that you were already awake."

"Point," he concedes, then obligingly shuts up when she raises a finger to stop him.

"Secondly," she continues, "last time I saw you, you said, _and I quote_ , 'jobs are for plebs'. Which I still take offense to, by the way."

"Point again. However! That," he says with a laugh, the good mood obviously restored, "was a joke! One that you punched me for making, if I recall."

"Yes, well, you deserved it. And finally--" At this he laughs again and looks up at the roof of the truck with a disbelieving grin on his face. This is an expression she's familiar with; she sees it a lot when Pike and Scanlan are together, and Pike is simultaneously amused and praying for patience. "Finally, I just like him more than you."

"I'll remember that for next time," he tells her, turning slightly to look at her while still keeping his attention on the road. "Though I can't really blame you."

And this is why Vex doesn't hang out with Percy as much as she should. 

Because she actually, honestly likes him. Not necessarily romantically, though she's self-aware enough to know that she has a Type and that he mostly falls into it, but just that... she likes spending time with him. He's funny, he's clever, and what's more he's _damaged_. She doesn't have to worry about fucking him up.

Vex has never tried to kid herself into thinking that either she or her brother are entirely healthy people.

To that effect, Vex has spent most of her adult life doing shitty, stupid things, with shitty, stupid people, and she knows a liar when she sees one.

And she knows that Percy may not have outright lied about anything to her face, but he is most certainly keeping something close to his chest.

As someone who perhaps knows more than most about the difficulties of life, she can relate. Everyone is entitled to their secrets, and Percy is no exception.

That doesn't mean she trusts him, though.

(But then again, Vex rarely trusts anyone.)

"How is his job going, anyway?" Percy asks, oblivious to her thoughts. "I haven't seen him since the last time our group got together, and he'd just gotten it then. Does he like it?"

Vex snorts, thinks about her brother and the way he swoons about the apartment, head in the clouds, whenever he gets off of work. "It was weird for him at first, but I think it grew on him. Though that might mostly be attributed to the shop's owner."

She's only ever met Keyleth twice, but both times she could easily see how Vax could become so attached so quickly; Keyleth is beautiful, and happy, and she _trusts_. She's never seemed to care that she's employing an felon, which is probably exactly what Vax needs in a boss. 

Forgiveness.

"He likes it," she continues, a bit quieter now, a bit softer. "She lets him manage the shop by himself while she works in the nursery. Probably not the wisest course of action," she says, and Percy huffs as if he's not sure if he's allowed to laugh or not, "but he appreciates it. I appreciate it." She looks out the window. By now they've approached the town, and she can see lights in the distance, maybe fifteen minutes away. She blinks in surprise. She'd thought they were further away than that. (This is another reason why she doesn't hang out with Percy much. She gets caught up. She loses time. She doesn't _pay attention_.) "This is probably the best thing he could be doing right now. Things are starting to turn around for him."

"Just for him?" Percy asks, tone lowered to match hers. It does interesting things to the timbre of his voice, the way it raises up in question. Vex represses a shiver.

She should have called her brother anyway. She's not like him. She doesn't like to get attached.

She looks back over at Percy, taps her nails pointedly against the case of her kit again, one eyebrow raised. "Percival, you've literally just driven an hour out into the countryside to come pick me up because my car broke down after a kegger where I gave illegal tattoos. If my life were a map, I believe that at this point I would reasonably be at rock bottom."

"Technically it's been about an hour and a half now," he corrects, but glances back over at her, and again, his concern seems so _genuine_. "Aren't you apprenticing at a shop, though?"

"Unpaid," she sighs, "and only three times a week."

"But it's something," he says firmly. A long moment passes, then with a sigh he takes a hand off the wheel and puts it on her shoulder. She can't feel it through the thick fabric of her coat, but she can hear the rasp of texture as his thumb slides across it comfortingly. "You are very far from rock bottom, Vex. Take it from someone who has hit it and is clawing his way back up."

(He makes allusions to a difficult past but he doesn't talk about it. She doesn't know anything about who he was before she met him only a few months ago. She doesn't trust him. She _doesn't trust him._ )

She nods her head slowly in response, and his hand on her shoulder squeezes briefly before he puts it back on the wheel.

"Besides," he continues, eyes on the road once more. They're approaching city limits, and street lights are starting to appear on the road. Whenever they pass one, the fluorescent light throws his features into contrast, washes out his pale skin, makes the dark circles under his eyes stand out more. It's a little bit haunting. It's a little bit entrancing. "I am more than willing to help a friend in need. I've had little enough of those in the past, friends, and now that I've got some I'm rather inclined to keep them." He smiles at her again. "Besides, I'm kind of hoping that this will make up for the pleb comment from last time."

\-------

(Vex does not like to be a cliche. She doesn't like to lump herself in with anyone else, has tried her entire life to strive to be her own person, set apart from the rest. It's necessary when you're a twin, when you're a lower class kid in a public school, when you've got to fight tooth and nail to get anywhere in life.

The Type of person that she's attracted to is generally broad. Male or female, doesn't matter; so long as they're clever, they make her laugh, and they respect her privacy.

Unfortunately, if her past relationships are any indication, another prevalent trait that seems to tie into her Type is that they are typically _dangerous._ )

\-------

Vex and Vax live in an apartment with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a small den above a book shop close to the center of town. This might seem fancy or extravagant, but the rent is cheap because the shop is right near the train tracks, which generally see the most use around one in the morning, and because of the book dust and old paper smell, which was novel in the beginning until Vax's allergies started to kick in.

The book shop is owned by a man named Shaun Gilmore. He and Vax flirt harmlessly but relentlessly, which Vex would find far more tolerable and amusing if they'd either fuck already and get it out of their systems, or if it got them a discount on their rent, which it doesn't.

It could be better, but it could also definitely be worse, and the lights are thankfully off in the apartment when Percy pulls the truck into the tiny side parking lot.

Percy kills the engine and blinks against the harsh glare of the street light that's set at the corner of the lot, then turns and looks at her. Now that they're in full light for longer than a few seconds, Vex can see that he's dressed in a set of striped pajamas, the pant bottoms of which are tucked neatly into combat boots. It's so silly; she has to stomp down a rush of affection for this strange, lovely man that she hardly knows.

"Thank you for coming to get me," she says again, quietly. Now that they're parked and outside her home, she feels more subdued, like if she doesn't whisper she might wake up her brother from here. He nods in reply.

"It was my pleasure," he replies, a small smile tilting his face. It's a little crooked on one end, and she knows that she needs to leave if she's starting to _study_ him. "And, Vex? Get your car fixed. If you can get it towed here tomorrow I'll come by and we can try to jump it and I'll put some oil in it, and we'll go from there."

He reaches out as if to touch her shoulder again but seems to think better of it; before he can pull back, she grabs at his hand on instinct, threads their fingers together and squeezes.

"Thanks," she repeats, as sincerely as she can, and then lets go. He lets it happen, the only visible reaction a slight widening of his eyes, and then he nods at her. "Go get some sleep, Percival."

She opens the door, pulls herself and her kit out, and hoists it up onto her hip. She pauses outside the truck, staring in at him for another few moments, then says, "Good night, Percy."

He laughs, a soft and quiet thing. "Good morning, Vex." Then the door shuts behind her and the engine turns over, the headlights snapping on. He waits for her to climb the steeps stairs up to the apartment, which she appreciates because she's always kind of scared that she'll fall and break her hip, and after she's fished out her keys and opened the door she waves at him. A second or so passes, and then the truck backs out of its parking spot and he's back on the road and disappearing behind a curve.

Vex shuts the front door behind her and then leans against it with a sigh. She tries in vain not to think about all the fucking money she's going to have to spend, either fixing her current car or buying a new one. She tries not to think about Percy. That's in vain, too.

A low growl jolts her from her thoughts and she flips on the kitchen light, then frowns and puts her hand on her hips.

Trinket is on the couch.

As soon as he sees who it is the growling stops and he thumps his tail slowly against the cushions, big brown eyes peering at her guiltily.

"Trinket," she hisses, "get off! Bad boy!" His tails thumps a bit harder but other than that he doesn't move. She can't even imagine how many little hairs are all over the furniture now.

The bathroom door opens suddenly and Vex jumps, startled. She hadn't even noticed that the light had been on inside it. "Relax, sister," Vax says, walking out with one towel around his waist and another pulling at his hair, which is dripping with water. Steam drifts out of the room behind him and Vex places a hand on her chest, her heart racing.

"Jesus Christ, Vax," she hisses, stumbling to the kitchen table and dropping down into a chair, her kit left by the door. She drops her face into her hands and watches through her fingers as he walks back to his bedroom, chuckling. She turns and checks the time on the oven's clock. It's only like a quarter past four, a good two hours before her brother usually gets up. "Why the fuck are you up this early?"

The bedroom door is cracked open, so she can hear when he calls back to her, "Kiki wanted us to start early today, says she needs help transplanting some of the orchids before we open up."

(Vex groans. Vax has only had the job for a couple months, but whenever they transplant or re-pot something Keyleth inevitably sends him home with a cutting. The end table beneath the window in the den is covered in pots, and they're starting to migrate to the sill beneath the window in the kitchen. It's cute, but they don't have the _space_.)

"So," her brother says, drawing the word out long, and Vex groans again, the surprise that made her heart race earlier turning into dread. "Where've you been, stubby?" He comes out of the bedroom and turns on one of the lamps, scrutinizing her closely. He's in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt with cats in space on it that she's pretty sure Scanlan got him for Christmas last year. He squints at her, hands working to pull his damp hair into a messy bun. "You look like you crawled through a blender."

Oh fuck, does she?

In a move that's half horrified curiosity and half stalling, Vex runs to the bathroom to inspect herself in the mirror. It's... well. It could be worse? She could definitely use a hairbrush and some of the eyeliner she'd put on before leaving has smeared a little, but she's never been too makeup heavy so it's not... horrible.

Christ, this is what Percy came and picked up. Thank God she's not actively pursuing him. Otherwise this would just be _embarrassing_.

"I went to a party," she says finally, combing out her long hair. "A couple towns over." Vax hums in response, and Vex swallows. Taking a wet wipe, she carefully cleans the eyeliner off of her face, then turns to lean against the doorway. In the den, Vax has dropped onto the couch beside Trinket and is scratching behind his ear. The dog looks pleased as punch to be on the furniture _and_ getting attention. Spoiled rotten.

"The, uh. The car layed down on me on the way back home."

Vax's head jerks up to study her anew, eyes wide with concern. He pulls himself up off the couch (Trinket whines) and strides over to her, looking her up and down like he's expecting to suddenly find her missing a limb or something. "What? How? What happened? How'd you get home? Why didn't you call me?"

Vex holds up a hand to stop him and he bats it away with a frown. 

"Jesus, what is this, the Inquisition? The battery died or something. I knew you had work in the morning and didn't want to wake you, so I called Percy because he helped me out with the car last time. He came and got me."

"You should have called me," Vax says, looking annoyed and hurt all at once. God, now she feels guilty. "I'd have come to get you."

"I know you would have," she sighs. "I know."

"Keyleth would have understood if I had to come in late."

"Yeah. Maybe."

Vax stares at her hard for a long moment before sighing as well and holding his arms out. She hesitates, then goes in for the hug. "She would have understood," he says again. "Are you okay, though? Nobody tried to give you any grief?"

"Percy did, a little," she says with a small laugh, just enough to make it clear that she's joking. "But he was really cool about it."

"So the car's kaput?" he murmurs.

"Yeah. I'm sorry."

"It's okay," he says. "I can take my bike."

"...sorry."

Vax doesn't respond to that, just hold her a little tighter. After a second or two she just sort of melts into it, leaning on him heavily. He smells like men's soap and her hair conditioner, an odd mix of scents that still makes sense to her, and she finally feels safe.

Not that she can't feel safe around Percy. She just... she doesn't like to let down her guard.

She doesn't know. She doesn't want to think about it. She's _tired_.

Vax kisses her hair and then glances over his shoulder at the clock. 

"I've got to leave in half an hour," he says slowly, "but if you think you can stay up that long I'll make us some waffles and bacon." At the word bacon, Trinket huffs hopefully from the couch.

"None for you," Vex says firmly, and he whines again. She tucks her face into her brother's shoulder and smiles. "That sounds lovely."

\-------

No, wait.

Hold on.

 _This_ is how it all starts.

Vex's car has been making concerning noises for the past month, and Vax tells her about a guy he met in group who does mechanic work.

"He's not, like, an actual mechanic," Vax says. "I don't think he's employed at a shop or anything, but he's crazy smart about that kind of stuff. He helped Thorbir replace a part on his Harley a few weeks ago. I mentioned you do tattoos a while ago and he said he might be interested in getting in touch, so maybe you guys can work out a trade or something."

"Socialist," she accuses with a smile, and he shrugs.

"Hey, sometimes it works."

When Vex thinks of a mechanic, she typically thinks of a larger, muscley guy in overalls who's probably already got some tattoos and has grease smeared on his face, and who looks like he could fuck somebody up.

When Vex thinks of a guy named Percy, she typically thinks of a skinny, lily-white prep school boy who's allergic to everything and who bruises like a week-old peach.

Percival de Rolo, she finds, is somewhere between a mix of the two.

He greets her with a handshake, a tired smile, and a full name that Scanlan could probably have his kids use for their vocal warmups. He pours over her portfolio with an intent eye, then nods and spends an hour outside in the parking lot, fiddling around under the hood of her car and even pulling some ramps out of the bed of his clunker of a pick-up and setting them up so he can drive her car onto them to crawl underneath.

Vex and Vax watch all of this from the window of the apartment above.

"We should probably help," Vex says, biting her lip when Percy uses his arms, sleeveless and with delightfully toned muscles visible even from this distance, to pull himself out from under the car.

"And lose this prime view?" her brother murmurs. "No, thank you. _Damn_ , Percival," he whistles as below them Percy stares at the car and scratches the snowy white scruff he's got on his jaw in thought, "I had no clue you were hiding guns like _those_ beneath that jacket."

Vex, used to comments like this and knowing that if Vax were actually interested he'd have bedded the guy already, just nods in agreement.

After another few minutes Percy stomps up the stairs, opening the door after a brief knock, and then takes his heavy boots off at the threshold. "Well, I found a couple-- ah, thank you," he says as Vex hands him a glass of water and Vax hands him a wet towel to wipe himself off with, seemingly oblivious to their oogling. "I found a couple of problems."

He then proceeds to tell her the laundry list of reasons why her car sucks, Vex barely following the explanations and Vax clearly not even trying, too entranced with the way Percy's throat works as he talks.

Vex tries to total up in her head all the money she'd have to dish out to fix everything which results in a brief mental error screen.

Percy seems to agree, because he sends her an apologetic look as he says, "You may want to consider selling it for scrap and getting a new one altogether."

They have a light lunch before Vex has to set everything up, and she finds that Percy is... charming. He and Vax have a friendly rapport, snipping at each other good-naturedly and drawing Vex into the conversation easily. People tend to get overwhelmed when interacting with the twins when they're together (the first time she'd met Keyleth, she'd spent the entire time finishing Vax's sentences for him. The way the florist's eyes had grown steadily wider was _hilarious_.) but Percy doesn't seem at all intimidated, bantering back and forth with them both effortlessly almost immediately.

He's funny, and clever, and oddly proper despite the fact that he's still got grease smeared beneath the rim of his glasses. Vex can see how Vax could feel connected to him so quickly despite the odd circumstance of their meeting.

"So," Vex says after the conversation has wound down and her fingers have started itching for her tattoo gun. Vax has left to take Trinket for a walk (and that had been hilarious, Percy's eyes widening in surprise when the great bear of a dog had jumped up to lick at his face) and the two of them are cleaning up the kitchen. Vex had tried to stop him, saying that he was a guest, but Percy had insisted on helping her do dishes. "What kind of tattoo are you looking for?"

"I have a piece of calligraphy that I'd like done under my shoulder blades," he says, drying a plate with a towel and setting it down carefully in the dish rack. He hesitates, then says haltingly, "It, ah. It probably won't make any sense to you, but--"

"But it's important to you," she guesses, and he nods, relieved.

This is why Vex likes doing quotes and sayings, tiny bits of wisdom pushed into skin so they can be carried around forever. For every peace sign she puts on a twenty year old, she puts a Pablo Neruda quote on someone else, or a Never Forget, or an aspiration. It doesn't have to mean anything to her, because it means something to _them._

That's also the easiest way to get a judge of someone's character, she thinks. Find out what they're willing to permanately put on their bodies.

After they finish Vex vacuums and dusts and sets her kit up in the living room, making the environment as clean as she can. Percy helps her wipe everything down, then after the two of them deliberate for a minute or so she sends him off to the shower to scrub the sweat and grease off of his skin.

She's ready when he comes out, dressed in a pair of borrowed sweatpants from Vax and toweling at his short white hair. Vex is delighted to see that the definition doesn't stop at his arms; Percy is skinny as a twig, but he's _toned._

He pulls a sheet of paper carefully out of his messenger bag ("Man purse," Vax had said cheerfully after Percy'd dropped it off inside and left to go work on the car) and hands it to her.

In graceful, looping capital letters that are clearly free-handed, she reads NO MERCY.

It's a little cliche, she thinks but doesn't say, because there's a shadow in Percy's eyes when he looks at it. Yes, this definitely means something important to him.

"Did you write this?" she asks, pouring out her ink as Percy lays himself across the couch, arms folded beneath his head. "It's very pretty."

"No," he says shortly. "My sister did. One word beneath each shoulder blade, if you please. To scale."

Prone as he is, he can't see her considering face.

He's clearly educated, probably more so than she and Vax combined. He knows his way around an engine but isn't employed. He did an hour's work unpaid for a simple tattoo that literally anyone with a gun could do. And as much as they talk in group, she knows that Vax _still_ doesn't know why he's there.

Warnings start pinging off in her head. She knows that she could really grow to like this guy, but she doesn't _trust._

"This will hurt," she says after she's applied the stencil and Vaseline, holding a mirror so that he can see the placement. He nods, and she dips the needle into the ink. "I'm sorry."

Percy laughs, a short little thing that doesn't sound all that happy. "That's fine. I'm accustomed to pain."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohP8wJ_AhXo)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm not tagging minor characters to avoid clogging the tags up. just assume that if they show up in critical role, they'll probably at least get a mention.

Gregory "Grog" Strongjaw is six feet tall, probably four times her weight in muscle alone, and has the biggest, clumsiest-looking hands that Vex has ever seen. He's also one of Vex's mentors at Witch Bolt, the only tattoo parlor in town. He specializes in geometric patterns and tribal designs, which she can totally get into; after Pike had told her about him, she'd followed his work on Instagram for a couple months before gathering up the courage to inquire about an apprenticeship.

Grog is big, covered in tattoos himself, and not the most intelligent, for all that he's amazing with a gun. Normally this is where you'd hear that beneath his rough exterior he's a teddy bear with a heart of gold, but truthfully beneath his rough exterior is just more sandpaper and beer.

Vex likes him, though. He's big and intimidating, but he's a good teacher and he doesn't take any shit from anybody, which she respects. He also lets Vax borrow his car occasionally, which has been a godsend the last few weeks; trying to get both of the twins everywhere they need to be with only a six-speed bike between them is _murder_.

Her other mentor is the owner of Witch Bolt, an older woman named Zahra. Her style is more loose and abstract than Vex's, who prefers bold and blunt lines, though she's been trying to branch out some. Zahra is graceful, elegant, and handsome in a way that Vex sometimes wishes she herself was, when she's lonely and had a little too much to drink.

Between the two of them, the apprenticeship is fucking stressful, but even in just the last five months she's been doing it she can see marked improvement.

"Alright," Grog says at the end of the day, getting all of his equipment ready to be disinfected and pulling off his gloves. "Let's see what you've got."

Vex just sat in and observed today, scribbling in her sketchbook whenever she wasn't watching Grog work with a client. She pulls out her sketches and spreads them across the table. She's still having trouble with proportions and scale, an issue that she doesn't usually run into with calligraphy, and she watches his face nervously as he shuffles through her drawings.

"Lotsa flowers," he grunts after a minute or so.

"My brother brings them home from work a lot, so I figured I might as well practice with them."

He grunts again and falls silent, going from the flowers to her dozens of practice pages of the alphabet in different scripts. Behind her, Vex hears the clicking of heels and tenses as Zahra comes up and leans over her shoulder to see the drawings on the table.

"Hmm. I like this one," she says, pointing a delicate finger, stained with ink, to a pencil sketch of a lily that Vex is actually rather proud of. "You're definitely improving your sizing issues."

Grog hums in agreement, though he seems bored after the tenth or so flower sketch, which Vex feels she can relate to on a personal level because she is so goddamn sick of flowers at this point that it's not even funny. "Needs stronger lines," he says finally, and Zahra immediately sighs.

"No, no, not for this kind of style, it needs to _flow_ more."

Vex, by now used to this argument, just rolls her eyes and sweeps all of her drawings into a pile. Grog pauses to hand her the last one he'd been holding, an experiment in charcoal, and taps on it. "Make sure you set these charcoal ones before you put them in your portfolio."

She stares down at it, blinking. She doesn't even really remember drawing it; it's Percy's glasses, from a week ago when he'd come by to try and fix her oil leak. When they'd finally determined that fixing the car would cost more than it was worth and Vax had called the time of death, the three of them had broken into the wine. At some point Percy had taken his glasses off, and Vex had run to get her stuff. He'd seemed confused but laughed when she'd started sketching furiously.

"Have you considered trying watercolors, darling?" Zahra says, interrupting her train of thought, which she's thankful for. Since that night he'd come to pick her up, she's been thinking about Percy... probably more than she should. "These flowers would look _exquisite_ in watercolor."

Grog groans and stomps off. This is another argument that they have pretty regularly, and sometimes Vex wonders how either of them has the patience for the other.

"I don't think I would be able to pull that off," Vex says as diplomatically as she can, and Zahra sighs in disappointment, though Vex can tell that most of it is just theatrics.

"Fine, fine. If you say so, my dear."

It's a Thursday, which is usually a slow day, and the appointment that they'd just finished up was the last one of the day. Zahra's got a consult in an hour, but Grog tells her to go ahead and close up the register. In the front lobby, the sky outside looks gray and dark through the windows even though it's still mid-afternoon. Grog checks the weather on his phone, tongue sticking out in concentration.

(Vex had had the pleasure of seeing him get his first smart phone, a gift from Pike, who she'd found out had been doing all of Grog's Instagram things for him. Before that he'd had one of those flip phones that can't do anything except call and text, and watching him struggle to figure out technology has been both entertaining and kind of sad, sort of like when Trinket gets his head stuck under the couch trying to retrieve a toy.)

"Looks like rain," he grunts. From the register, Vex sighs and rubs at her eyes. It's not a too terribly long walk from the shop to the apartment, since they live close to the middle of town, but rain in their area typically turns to sleet in winter, and Vax had the bike today so he could get to the greenhouse, which is outside of town.

Grog turns and eyes her for a second, brows furrowed. "Relax. I'll give you a ride home."

If anything good has come from Vex's car kicking the bucket, it would probably be that her pride has been knocked down a few pegs. She nods sullenly, but within a few minutes the bottom drops out and it starts pouring rain, so that quickly becomes thankfulness.

Her phone chimes in her pocket, and after she's finished counting the till she fishes it out. When she sees the message, she has to stomp down on a smile.

Percy has been sending her Craigslist ads for cheap cars in the area, with little comments attached to them. _Not a fan of German engineering,_ this one says with a link to a used Jetta, _but it's a nice price considering it doesn't have a lot of miles._ He's already offered to come with her to check out any car she might be interested in. She's trying not to read too much into it. It's sweet, but...

Lately she's been getting the feeling that Percy is lonelier than he lets on.

Still, some spark of something must show on her face, because when she looks up Zahra is watching her with a wicked little grin.

"Don't even," she warns, and the other woman crosses her arms, leaning against the counter. Grog looks between the two of them in confusion before determining that he doesn't care and goes back to poking around on his phone.

Zahra opens her mouth to comment, but Vex has no idea what she might have said because at that moment the door bangs open, the bell above it clanging angrily, and a half-sodden man steps through.

"Jesus _fuck_ ," Kashaw snaps, quickly stripping his coat and letting it fall heavily to the ground. "God couldn't wait for me to get inside before he started pissing, could He?"

Vex, who as the apprentice will undoubtedly end up being the one mopping the floor, hisses unintelligibly while Zahra rolls her eyes. Thankfully it seems that whatever Zahra was going to pick on her for earlier has been forgotten by their accountant storming in.

Kashaw comes in to do their accounting once or twice a month, since Zahra can't be bothered and Grog... doesn't really have the knack for math, to put it delicately, though Kash likes to visit randomly just to shoot the shit with Zahra. Vex thinks that there might be something going on between them; they certainly squabble like a married couple, even more so than Pike and Scanlan do.

She doesn't know that much about him, beyond the fact that he's perpetually grumpy and kind of pretty. He always complains about having to keep track of their numbers, but Vex has seen the payroll and she knows for a fact that he's not actually employed by the shop, so he's either doing it under the table (which she doubts, because Zahra is a bit of a stickler), or for free (which she wouldn't be surprised by at all, because Zahra is also super cheap).

When Zahra goes to help him out of his second, equally-drenched coat, he backs away and raises his hands up. "Whoa, whoa, lady, I know you want to take off my clothes, but back up. I got this."

Vex can hear the eyeroll from across the room.

Kash glances over to her and Grog behind the counter. "What's up big guy, new girl? How's it shakin'?" Then, without even waiting for a reply, he turns his attention back to Zahra, effectively ignoring them. "Zee, you're still coming over tonight, right? I found some new flicks that are _choice_."

"Yes, darling," Zahra says, taking his coat off for him while he's distracted. He doesn't seem to notice.

"Cool. We'll grab some Chinese or something. Jesus, I'm starving. Is that sub I left a few days ago still in the fridge?" He's moving through the lobby to the back room without pause, Zahra trailing after him with an amused look on her face. "Hey, new girl," he calls over his shoulder, not bothering to turn, "you might want to get that water up, somebody could trip."

Vex waits until they've left the room and then brings her hands up and mimes strangling him. Grog snorts.

"Go get your shit," he says. "I'll clean it up and we can head out."

"You're in a bit of a hurry," she says, surprised but pleased by his offer. She darts into the back to grab her portfolio, curious about what Zahra and Kash could be talking about but not willing to push her luck with Grog's generosity. When she comes back in the lobby, Grog is using Kashaw's third and mostly dry coat (he must be from the south because he's constantly cold and she only ever sees him in layers), which had been flung across the counter, to mop up the water on the floor. She pauses and stares. "Grog. We have a mop in the back."

"Yeah," he says placidly, "but I ate his sub yesterday and I want to get out of here before he finds out."

\-------

Sometimes, Vex thinks it's weird how most of her friends know each other.

The town they live in isn't big, but it's not _small_ , and it's just weird to see how it all connects.

For example, she met Grog through Pike, who is the least likely person Vex would expect to hang out with the gruff giant of a man. She knows that Pike and Kash go to the same church, and if asked she couldn't even articulate how strange it was to find out that Kash was religious, considering his demeanor, and also because she was legitimately under the impression that Zahra was a Satanist.

They've all gone out for beers a handful of times, her and her brother, Grog, Pike, and Scanlan, who she can't even really remember meeting but who seems to know literally everyone, simply by virtue of being a teacher at the only high school in the area. (If they're young enough, he's probably taught them. If they're old enough, he's probably taught their kids.)

Vex, who grew up with only her brother as a close friend, sometimes gets overwhelmed by how social her life has become, and that's not even counting her recent string of encounters with Percy. It's not bad, really, and Vax especially seems to enjoy their strange, makeshift little family.

So no, it's not bad. It's just weird.

\-------

(Nobody but her and Vax know Percy. She's asked. A few days ago, she realized that she doesn't even know where he _lives_.)

\-------

The ride home from the parlor is mostly silent, save for the downpour of rain hitting the roof of the car and the sound of the windshield wipers. It's not really an awkward silence; for all that she likes Grog as a mentor and an artist, the two don't have a lot in common outside of tattoos.

It's not the same comfortable, understanding silence that she gets with Percy. Just more of a general lack of conversation.

"Hey," he says suddenly, after a good five minutes of quiet. It startles her a little but she manages not to jump, and she turns and glares at him. He grins at her in that wild way he gets when he's enthusiastic about something. "Seriously, though, you done good. Need a lil' work on your perspective an' shit, but you're getting better. 'S good job."

Vex blinks a couple times and then smiles at him. "Thanks, big guy," she says, pleased and touched. "I appreciate it."

He hums and turns onto her street, and as she watches a serious look crosses his face. "Hey, Vex. Have you heard anything outta Scanlan lately? He's been kinda..." Grog's face tightens in thought as he tries to put his words together. "...weird," he finishes, clearly annoyed that he can't think of a better term to use.

Vex pauses to think about it for a moment. Now that she's been made aware of it, she realizes that she actually hasn't talked to Scanlan in a while, and that he'd ducked out the last time they'd all gone out for drinks. She knows that he's been busy preparing for a show, but even so that usually just means that he's hyped up and talking their ears off about it.

"No," she says slowly, a bit of concern welling up in her chest, "I haven't. Have you?"

Grog shakes his head and starts to slow, preparing to turn into the book shop's parking lot. "Nope. Pike ain't talked to him in a while, either." He flicks his turn signal on. "If he says anything, let us know, yeah? She's gettin' worried." He pulls to a stop, then tilts his head and says, "Huh."

Vex follows his line of sight, then echos him. "Huh."

Parked beside Vex's now defunct car is a petite little Geo Tracker with cutesy flowers done on the side in what appears to be spray paint.

"You got a teenage girl livin' with you now?" Grog asks curiously. Vex shakes her head and grabs her purse and portfolio, tucking it protectively into her coat.

"No. That would be Vax's boss."

"...is Vax's boss a teenage girl?"

"Sometimes I wonder." She tightens her scarf and coat, then glances over at him. "Thanks for the ride, Grog. I'll keep an ear out for Scanlan." He nods, and Vex opens the door and climbs out with a sigh.

She jogs through the rain, manages to take the steps two at a time and only slip once, and throws open the front door, panting and shaking water out of her hair once she's inside.

Trinket bounds up to her in a couple paces, the apartment not quite big enough for his bulk despite the open floor plan, and spins in circles around her, whuffing excitedly. "Hello buddy," she coos at him, grabbing a hold on his massive jowls and jiggling them. He pulls away, sneezes, and then goes back for more.

Vax and Keyleth are sitting at the kitchen table and watching in amusement, surrounded by tiny little strips of paper.

"Hi, Vex!" Keyleth says cheerfully, waving. A couple of the papers threaten to drift off of the table and she catches them with a muttered, "Aw fuck."

"Hello, stubby," Vax calls, attention already back on whatever he's working on. "You look like less of a drowned rat than I was expecting."

"Grog gave me a ride," she says, shedding her coat and hanging it up on the peg by the door and then going to tackle her scarf. Trinket is impeding her process by constantly rubbing his face against her hips.

Keyleth bounces excitedly in her seat. "Yeah, when I realized Vax was on the bike, I couldn't let him ride all the way back here in this weather, so I gave him a ride too."

"And now we're writing care cards," Vax finishes, already guessing what his sister was going to ask, "and waiting for the storm to pass a little so she doesn't have to be on the roads."

(Vex will never admit it, but the care cards that Keyleth writes by hand are the cutest fucking things. Each plant gets it's own individual card with instructions for watering and sun exposure, usually bracketed by smiley faces or little amateur sketches of the flower in bloom. It's sweet, and it adds a little personality to every plant in the apartment, but Vex doesn't know where she gets the _time_.)

She glances at the clock on the oven on her way to the fridge and raises an eyebrow. "It's only three, isn't your shop still supposed to be open?" She starts pulling out stuff to make a sandwich with, Trinket dead on her heels.

Keyleth blinks a couple times and then pales. "Oh, shit!" She whips around to look at Vax. "I can't remember if I locked the door. Did I lock the door?"

"No," he says, not looking up from the card he's working on, "but I did. I also flipped the sign to closed."

"Oh, okay." She calms briefly and then fidgets again. "What about the till, did we close down the till?"

Still not looking up, Vax says patiently, "We sold one bag of fertilizer today, Kiki. It'll keep for the night. Do you want me to text you about it so you can remember to subtract it tomorrow?"

"No, I'll remember," she says, biting her lip nervously but picking her pen back up and dragging a card in front of her.

Vax finally lifts his head, a few strands of hair falling out of his bun and into his eyes. He stares at her for a moment and then sighs. "I'm going to text you about it."

"That's probably a good idea, yeah," Keyleth agrees, relieved.

Vex watches this all in amusement, feeding little bits of pepperoni to Trinket, who's sitting on her feet.

"How was your day, Vex?" Keyleth asks, doodling a daffodil on the corner of her card as Vex uses a knife to spread mustard on a slice of bread and puts some more pepperoni on it. "Did you do any interesting tattoos?"

"Not me," she says, taking a bite and talking around it, "I just observed. Grog did a couple tribals and I shadowed a consult for a really cool sleeve idea with Zahra."

"I've been thinking about getting a tattoo," Keyleth says, a bit dreamily and clearly already distracted from her work again. She puts her chin in her hand and stares out the window into the gray rain beyond. Vax, noticing this, shakes his head silently and drags the card she'd been working on to finish writing the instructions. "I like the idea of them, but I'm always scared that if I get one I'll regret it in a few years."

Vex, whose pretty much gotten a tattoo a year since she became legal, shrugs her shoulders. "That's why you get one that means something. I always tell people, if you like an idea, sit on it for six months, and if you still like it after that then get it."

"Get a flower," Vax suggests, setting the now-finished card to the side. Vex tilts her head to look at it; his austere, type writer-straight print looks strange beneath Keyleth's cheerful, looping cursive. It's an interesting aesthetic, though. "The red chrysanthemums we had when I first started were lovely."

"I don't think I'd want a flower," Keyleth murmurs. She's still looking out the window but her eyes are far away, like she's seeing something at a great distance. "They're pretty, but they're fragile. They break and they die." The twins share a glance, Vex looking confused and Vax looking concerned. "Maybe a tree," she continues, not noticing the exchange, "like an oak. Something that's sturdy, and old. Wise. I think I'd rather be a tree than a flower."

Keyleth blinks a few times and then focuses back on them with a smile, but there's a strange melancholy in her expression that keeps it from reaching her eyes.

Vex slowly feeds Trinket another bit of meat. "O _kay_ , Confucius."

"There are trees that flower," Vax says mildly, pulling another card towards him and copying more instructions down. It breaks the tension a bit and Keyleth turns to look at him, smiling properly this time. "Dogwoods, for example. Magnolias."

"Dogwoods smell like cat piss," Vex cuts in. Vax sends her a dirty look but Keyleth just laughs.

"Maybe a magnolia then," she soothes, and Vax looks appeased.

"You could be pretty, wise, and you could smell good," he says decisively. After a few seconds Keyleth seems to get the implications of the statement and blushes, clearing her throat and nervously collecting all of the cards into a stack. Vex rolls her eyes and takes a big bite out of her sandwich.

After a minute or two of companionable silence, Keyleth's flush slowly dissipating and Vax looking pleased as punch at getting a reaction, Keyleth crosses her arms and looks at him hard. "Are you _sure_ you locked the door of the shop?"

"Yes," he says, flashing a smile at her. "Not that it'd do much good if someone really wanted to get in. The lock is depressingly easy."

Vex tenses and prepares herself for an uncomfortable reaction, but Keyleth surprises her, just clapping her hands in delight. "Oh! Could you pick it?"

He smiles a bit wider and goes back to his card with a little noncommittal hum, not saying anything.

"Whoa. Cool!" Keyleth seems to catch herself then and points a finger at Vax, waving it under his nose threateningly. "I mean, don't pick it, obviously. But it's cool that you can." Then she turns to Vex, red hair whipping over the back of the chair and catching on the sleeve of Vax's Henley. She pulls at it with a sigh. "What about you, Vex, can you pick locks too?"

She sounds so impressed and hopeful that Vex doesn't know if she should be insulted or not. Vax saves her from replying by cutting in with, "No, but she can pick noses," and then he laughs unattractively at his own joke. Keyleth gives a couple of chuckles, probably just to humor him. Vex has been putting up with this bullshit her entire life, and does not laugh at all.

They all jump when the lights cut out suddenly, then flicker back on, and a second or so later there's a huge crack of thunder that's so loud Vex is surprised the windows don't rattle from the force of it. Trinket whines and slinks into her bedroom, tail tucked between his legs, and Keyleth sighs. "God, I really hope this blows over soon."

"It's supposed to have passed over us by the evening," Vax says thoughtfully, capping his pen and tapping it against his bottom lip. The lights dim and then brighten again. "If it doesn't I'll have to miss group. It was going to be the first one since Allura came back, too."

"Maybe Grog will let you use his car," Vex suggests, a bit hesitantly. She thinks that Grog might actually be working at his second job tonight. (He's also a bartender part time in addition to being a tattoo artist, because apparently he's trying to go for Hooligan Bingo.)

"Ooh, _ooh!_ I can take you!" Keyleth says, bouncing excitedly again. "I've always wanted to go to therapy!" She pauses. Vax closes his eyes and chews on his lip, the way Vex knows he does when he's trying to hold something back. "No, wait. That came out wrong." She turns pleading, nervous eyes to Vax. "I didn't mean that to come out how it sounded."

"I understood," he assures her, handing a newly finished card over, and she shuffles it into her stack reflexively. Then he glances over at Vex and raises an eyebrow. She sighs inwardly, knowing what he's about to say. "You could come too, sister. It's open admittance and they don't make us talk if we don't want to. You could just sit in and watch." His expression is earnest, and it coupled with Keyleth's imploring eyes is almost lethal. "It might do you some good."

"I'll pass, thanks," Vex says wryly, chewing on the last of her sandwich. "I'd rather not drive out in that storm if it's all the same to you."

Her brother eyes her critically, then shrugs with a huff. "Fine, be that way. Your loss."

"Well, I'm excited!" Keyleth says brightly, and goes back to making her cards.

Attention no longer on him, Vax glances up at Keyleth, eyes soft and vulnerable in a way that Vex doesn't usually get to see them. There's a smile tilting his lips, just a little tiny one, but it stays even after he's turned back to his work.

Vex looks out the window into the cold, gray gloom on the other side, and closes her eyes.

\-------

That's the difference between the two of them, you know? That's why Vax goes to group counciling and Vex stays at home and draws. That's why Vax gravitates towards Keyleth, beautiful, smiling, open-minded Keyleth, and why Vex is too defensive to respond to Percy's most likely sincere offer of help.

The thing is, that's what Vax wants. He wants redemption. He wants forgiveness.

Vex just wants to survive.

\-------

(They were fifteen the first time Vax broke into a shop. Vex was spotting for him outside. She doesn't even think he took anything. He just wanted to see if he could.

Shitty, stupid people doing shitty, stupid things.

God. _God._

They'd just been so _young._ )

\-------

About half an hour after Keyleth and Vax leave to go to group, Vex gets a text from Scanlan.

**FR: SCANMAN**  
_hey lady, thinkin bout hittin the bar tmrw. grog and boo comin. hmu if interested ;)_

Vex blinks down at her phone a couple times and then rolls her eyes, settling herself into a more comfortable position on the couch. Trinket grumbles at the movement but quickly goes back to his chainsaw snoring, nose tucked into the backs of her knees. She thinks about what Grog said earlier in the day and sighs.

**TO: SCANMAN**  
_I'll be there. Idk about Vax tho._

Within a few seconds the alert goes off again.

**FR: SCANMAN**  
_k_

She hesitates, then slowly taps out another message.

**TO: SCANMAN**  
_You ok? Havent heard from you in a while_

When a minute passes without a response, she shakes her head and sighs harder. After ten minutes, she sets her phone to the side and goes back to drawing.

She's got HGTV playing on mute in the background and her sketchbook in her lap, scribbling aimlessly. She likes writing nonsense words in fancy script as warm ups; there's a half-dozen swear words in a variety of fonts stuck onto the fridge with magnets. (Her favorite is the VAX SUX one she did in Comic Sans with bright pink ink, stuck there by a magnet of a woman holding a pie that proudly proclaims _Because chocolate can't get you pregnant!_ )

The apartment always seems so quiet without her twin around. Even when they're not talking, the sound of him moving around and breathing and just _existing_ is comforting to her. Here, tonight, in the low light of the lamp and the glow of the muted tv, with the rain lashing against the windows, it seems too... something.

Too quiet. Too sad.

Vex isn't really a social person, doesn't require interaction to be happy, but right now she just feels sort of. Lonely.

Trinket, as if hearing the turn of her thoughts, huffs and lifts his head, setting it on her leg. He heaves a massive sigh that makes his lungs sound like billows in his chest and blinks his big brown eyes up at her.

"Looks like it's just you and me tonight, bud," she says, resting a hand on his head and scratching between his thin leathery ears. He closes his eyes and leans into the touch.

As if on cue, her phone chimes again with another text message, and Vex sets aside her pen to grab for it before it vibrates off the arm of the couch. Expecting a reply from Scanlan, she's surprised when instead it's a picture message from her brother; she opens it to see him and Keyleth, faces pressed together so they can both fit into the shot. Keyleth's mouth is open, teeth showing, and her eyes are wide in excitement. Vax's smile, while less expressive, is still genuine.

Her first and most visceral reaction is of fear, but she forces that down and shoves it into a dark corner in her mind. Vax is not replacing her. She's his twin. She's irreplaceable.

Her next reaction is a sort of sad, self-aware smile. She pulls Trinket up to her level, ignoring his groans of annoyance, and sticks her tongue out for a selfie with him and then sends the picture to Vax. She suddenly doesn't feel much like drawing anymore, and tosses her sketchbook onto the table, unmuting the tv.

She's only vaguely half aware of what's happening in the show, too busy trying to push away the existential dread that occasionally creeps up on her, when her phone makes another cheerful alert noise. She stares at it for a long moment before pulling it forward and unlocking it.

Another message from her brother.

**FR: VAX**  
_p-val here for the first time in a while_

Before she can type out her reply ( _Please dont ever call him that again_ ), a lightning-fast second message comes through. She sends it anyway.

**FR: VAX**  
_he wearin a waistcoat n slacks_

And then another,

**FR: VAX**  
_its dapper aF_

**FR: VAX**  
_can i call him p-viddy then_

**TO: VAX**  
_No_

**TO: VAX**  
_Also pics or it didnt happen_

She doesn't get a reply until the commercial break, but when she does it's another picture message. She opens it up, and god help her but she _giggles_.

It's definitely Percy, but from a weird angle; Vax was clearly trying to take a picture of him without being obvious about it. He's leaning back in a metal folding chair, legs crossed, with his chin in one hand and a cardboard coffee cup held loosely in the other. And he _is_ dapper as fuck, to coin a phrase from her brother, in a charcoal waistcoat and matching slacks with a white button up beneath, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

Vex has never really been a fashionable person, she and her brother both have always been more of the jeans-and-graphic-tee variety, but her chosen profession is one that requires her to have an eye for aesthetics, and Percy certainly cuts a nice figure. She has no clue where he must have come from before group that would have required him to dress like this, because as far as she knows this kind of wardrobe isn't his normal fare. A button up shirt, maybe, but usually that's paired with the kind of pants that you either find in a mall for fifty bucks with the label "fashionably frayed", or in a thrift store for five bucks.

She thinks about it for a moment. Then, feeling slightly guilty, she saves the picture to a folder deep, deep inside her camera roll.

Hey, she may not trust the guy any further than she could throw him, but he looked _good._

Besides, maybe she wants to. Trust him, that is. It's not really such a strange concept for her. She trusts Vax, obviously, and Pike. Scanlan and Grog too, at least to an extent. She might not trust Zahra with her money but she'd trust her not to coddle her about her work. So clearly she is capable of trusting more people than just herself and her dog.

It's just... she gets a vibe from him. The kind of vibe that you get when you look at a cactus. Like if you touch it, it'll hurt you. Maybe that's not the best analogy, but it's just this feeling she's got.

Vex's gut instincts are not typically wrong, but they have been before. And Percy apparently wants to genuinely pursue at least a friendship with her, if nothing else.

And, well. Vex isn't exactly swimming in admirers, here. She's not going to lie and say that it hasn't been... kind of nice, having Percy's attention.

On the heels of this thought, her phone makes an alert to another message, and when Vex looks at who sent it her eyebrows shoot up.

What is it they say about speaking of the devil?

**FR: PERCY**  
_Your brother and his... friend? Girlfriend? Boss? keep giggling at each other and looking at his phone. I think they're watching cat videos on YouTube. Very disrespectful._

She chews on her lip and contemplates not responding for all of ten seconds before typing up her own reply.

**TO: PERCY**  
_Shes his boss-friend. And youre one to talk. Arent you texting while someone is speaking?_

Within seconds her phone vibrates again.

**FR: PERCY**  
_Boss-friend. That is so confusing._

**FR: PERCY**  
_Also, yes, perhaps, but at least I'm being quiet about it. It's just Thorbir speaking right now, we've all already heard this story a thousand times._

**TO: PERCY**  
_Is it about his friend that dropped acid and died_

**TO: PERCY**  
_Doesnt he tell that story every time_

**FR: PERCY**  
_YES._

She smiles down at her phone, pulling her legs up to her chest, and bites at her thumb. Then she immediately realizes what she's doing and forces herself to stretch back out onto the couch. Trinket, who's being pulled this way and that every time she moves, gives up and drops down onto the floor. He shuffles a couple paces away and then flops down, glaring at her.

On a whim, she scrolls back through her previous messages and pulls up another contact.

**TO: SCANMAN**  
_How would you feel about me bringing a +1 tomorrow_

As she waits for his reply, she hefts herself up off of the couch, tugging her sleep shirt (the Three Wolf Moon one she'd stolen from Vax, if only so he wouldn't wear it out in public and embarrass her) back all the way up onto her shoulder. She pads into the kitchen, past Trinket whose ears perk up hopefully, and stands in front of the fridge. She contemplates between the wine and the ice cream before going with the ice cream, leaning against the counter and digging into it with a spoon.

Percy's dressed to the nines and in group counciling, while she's at home in a shirt two sizes too big and sweatpants that may or may not be her backup period pair with a tub of Rocky Road. Clearly, she is the better adjusted of the two of them.

Spoon hanging from her mouth, she lifts her phone back up in front of her, ignoring the way Trinket has snuck over and is staring at her again.

**TO: PERCY**  
_This may be out of the blue but im going out for drinks with some friends of mine tomorrow night and i thought you might want to come_

After a minute passes with no response, she sighs and backtracks, feeling a little silly. Goddamn, she's almost _thirty_. She should be past this shit.

**TO: PERCY**  
_If you cant thats cool_

**TO: PERCY**  
_Vax is coming too tho_

This may or may not be true, but she's sure that she can wheedle her brother into coming if it means that Percy would be there, too. Vax seems eager enough to hang out with him, after all.

**TO: PERCY**  
_Just figured Id ask_

When her phone buzzes again she can't unlock it fast enough, and she almost sighs audibly at the disappointment when she sees it's not him.

**FR: SCANMAN**  
_sure bby the more the merrier amirite_

Then, almost immediately after that,

**FR: PERCY**  
_Apologies, we split for break and I was getting some more coffee._

**FR: PERCY**  
_I'd love to come._

Vex sets her phone to the side, pushes it away from her on the counter and tilts her head back to stare up at the ceiling. Apparently she's not as past this shit as she thought.

\-------

The first time they break in somewhere, Vex is pressed up against a building and trying to control her breathing.

The brickwork at her back is warm from the balmy summer night, which is not helping the nervous sweat she's struggling to keep from wiping from her brow. The city is bigger and busier than the small town they grew up in, and she has to look casual; there are still people walking past, even this late at night, though thankfully most keep their heads down and ignore her.

She has her phone out and is pretending to look through it, but her eyes keep darting down the street in a way that she's convinced is obvious to anyone who'd stop to look longer than five seconds. This harebrained scheme Vax has cooked up is going to get them caught, she just knows it.

The sad thing is, she's almost hoping that it will.

Maybe then _he'd_ notice.

Around the side of the building, a door opens, a very slight creaking of hinges that she only catches because she's listening for it. After a few seconds, Vax falls in beside her out of the shadows, breathing shallow but quiet and pupils dilated.

Without a word and in unison they head West, baring to the left at the first turn they come across, and after they've passed a couple blocks in absolute silence Vax lets out a heavy sigh of air and Vex feels that little clench of fear that'd been wrapped around her heart start to loosen.

"Christ, Vax," she murmurs, wringing her hands together. "You said you wanted to see if you could get the door open, not that you were going to check out the fucking decorating. You were in there for like ten minutes."

He laughs breathily. "Well, I got the door open, anyway."

"No fucking kidding," she hisses, and Vax shoves his hands into his pockets. She can't tell, but she thinks they might be shaking. Hers certainly are.

After a good half a mile's walk passes in silence their father's apartment building looms ahead of them, some of the rooms lit by warm light in the darkness of the early morning. "Are you going to burn your gloves? That's what you're supposed to do, right? So there's no evidence?"

"What?" He scoffs. "No. Don't be dramatic." The night doorman lets them in with an eyeroll and a little wave of his hand, used to the twins coming and going at all hours of the night.

When they're in the safety of the elevator, Vex fidgets and then turns to him again and continues, "I still don't think it was a good idea to pick somewhere so close to Father's." (It's not home. It's never going to be home. God, they don't even _have_ a home.)

"Relax," Vax says, clearly not as nervous as her now that they've put some distance between them and the store they'd just fucking broken into, god how stupid _are_ they? "I cased the place a couple days ago. I was so careful, they probably won't even realize they'd had a visitor."

Vex huffs and leans against the wall of the elevator, watching the numbers tick up to the top floor. It's a nice building in a nice part of the city and she hates it. "Did you even take anything?"

Her brother slouches beside her, hands still in his pockets. His pupils are still blown wide and she's not sure if it's from fear or pleasure. Vax has always had this obsession with breaking rules. With danger.

"Nothing they won't miss," he says finally, and she sighs.

When the door opens, she half expects their father to be standing on the other side, his severe face pulled into a frown, but he's not there. He never is.

She's not sure why she still lets herself get her hopes up.

It never really ends well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tru fax in the original crack iteration of this fic, vex was a girl scout troupe leader and had to call percy, an eagle scout troupe leader who's her rival, to come pick her up on the side of the road. it was going to be like 4k of "being prepared" puns and then they were gonna bang. but then i tripped and fell into a plot. OOPS.
> 
> also, keeping descriptions vague in regards to trinket's breed, vex's tattoos, and the general over-all location so readers can imagine them as whatever they want is difficult ;_; (for reference, i personally imagine trinket as a mastiff-pit mix)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> firstly i'd like to apologize for how long this took for me to put out. i work a full time, commission-based job that exponentially picks up business during the warmer months, and i love it, but it's absolutely physically and emotionally exhausting. in addition to this, we've replaced two new managers, including the one that's immediately superior to me.
> 
> basically, grif is super busy, and misses not being an adult.

Vex's first relationship was with a guy named--

Wait.

What was his name again? God, she can't even remember it.

Well, fuck.

Anyway, that in and of itself should give you an approximate idea of exactly how much the relationship meant to her, which was clearly very little. She remembers he was blond, and kind of cute in like a scruffy way, and that he'd been a bit of a troublemaker, one of those kids that smart, sensible sixteen year old girls would stay away from. Vex isn't stupid, not by any stretch of the imagination, because you don't survive what she's been through if you're stupid, but she'll openly admit to the fact that she's not the greatest at thinking decisions through before she makes them.

Obviously not, considering the habit of making poor life choices seems to have followed her into adulthood.

Regardless, she'd mostly dated the guy just to get back at her father, who was absent on his best days and emotionally and mentally abusive on his worst, but the joke was on her because daddy dearest didn't give a _fuck._ Maybe if she'd let him knock her up, but while she might be spiteful she's not _that_ dumb. In the end the entire thing was a disappointment; she lost her virginity and a bit of self-respect, and her father didn't even notice beyond a snide comment about counting the silverware to make sure it was all still there after one of the boy's visits to their apartment. The virginity thing wasn't that big of a deal, she'd never put much stock into shit like that. It was just a thing. And as for her father's jab about the silverware...

Well, fuck him. Anything that was missing from the apartment was because Vex had swiped it _herself_.

\-------

On Friday, Grog lets Vex leave halfway through the day. The rain still hasn't abated, and the streets are empty of pedestrians. In the summer, the town isn't exactly _bustling_ , but they still get passers-by who pop their heads in to check out the artists. This time of year in this kind of weather, there's not much business, but thankfully the hours are pretty flexible. (Vex had gotten bored one day and free-handed an available hours sign in fancy script with a sharpie that said _OPEN: 9 - WHENEVER WE WANT_. Grog had liked it, and so had Zahra, but she'd said it was unprofessional and that they couldn't hang it up in the front window. Then they'd argued and ro-sham-bo'd over it, so now it's hanging up in the front window anyway.)

He's doing a consult, though, so he can't give her a ride home, and the temperature only seems to be dropping, so Vex just hangs around the shop and prays the rain will let up eventually.

She's in the break room, playing a game on her phone, when a text alert rings through, showing her brother's name. She raises an eyebrow and opens the message up.

**FR: VAX**  
_hey stubs any chance you & grog could swing by the shop and gimme a ride after you get out? kikis doin a family thing so im here on my lonesome but were doing exactly ZERO business so if u can im gonna close up early but if u cant ill see if she can when she gets back_

She frowns and types out a reply, getting halfway through it when the break room door opens. Zahra and Kash both walk in, engrossed in their own conversation and acknowledging her only briefly, so she pays them no mind.

**TO: VAX**  
_Not sure. Grogs in a consult. Im technically done for the day already. Ill ask him when he finishes it it shouldnt be too much longer_

"--and I'm telling you, Zee, if you just invested a little, you could make _soooo_ much bank," Kashaw says, rummaging through the fridge and coming up empty. He grumbles as he slams the door shut and gives it a little kick. Vex thinks about Grog eating his sub yesterday and smothers a smile.

"I don't have much interest in the stock market, dear," she says mildly, fixing herself a cup of coffee. As intern, it's technically Vex's unofficial-official job to keep the coffee pot full, but general consensus is that she makes it too strong, so Zahra goes ahead and sets up another pot. Vex has never seen a group of people drink more coffee than these three; the break room always smells like a fresh brew.

"I'm just saying, I've been following the numbers, and it's easy money if you can keep on top of it. Buy stock in a sure thing and just sit on it for a bit. Facebook, for instance, that's simple. Apple's always a good choice. Whitestone's picked back up, they're up point-eighty percent from this time last month as of yesterday." He stops talking to frown at her cup of coffee intently and after a stare-off that lasts a few seconds Zahra rolls her eyes and hands it over. Kashaw gives a little "Yay!" of delight and takes a big gulp, then turns to finally look at Vex. "What about you, new girl? You play the stock market?"

Vex's philosophy regarding money is that if she can't put her hands on it, she doesn't have it. She's never trusted banks, has never been fond of signing contracts, and has only banked the minimum necessary to establish a credit score, which, at this point, is probably far poorer than she'd like it to be. For the most part, her money is stashed in various places in their apartment, places people wouldn't think to look for it, and she likes it that way.

And if anyone tries to rob them, well. Vex and her brother didn't grow up in the best environment. They know how to defend themselves.

"Not really," is what she says instead of explaining all of that, because it's simpler. Her phone chimes again.

**FR: VAX**  
_ok_

Kash looks like he's about to make some disparaging comment, probably regarding her understanding of money and the stock market in general and that being why she doesn't bother with it, but Zahra stops him with a hand on his arm and a stern look. Vex used to wonder how the older woman always knows when Kash is about to say something shitty, but now she's starting to recognize it, that look in his eye that flashes for a split second when he's thought of something mean and is considering whether or not it's funny enough to say anyway. He grumbles again instead and gives her the coffee mug back when she makes a motion for it.

"So you and Grog are going out for drinks tonight?" Zahra asks, changing the subject.

"Like a date?" Kash interrupts before Vex can answer, wiggling his eyebrows at her.

"No," she says to him firmly, and then, "Yes," to Zahra. "My brother is coming too, and so are a couple of our other friends. You've met Scanlan, right?"

Zahra hums in the affirmative and takes a sip of her coffee before passing it back over to Kashaw. (Vex doesn't get it. _How are they not married?_ ) "The short fellow, yes? Teaches at the high school?" When Vex nods, she smiles and crosses her arms over her chest, her eyes going far away and a bit wistful. "He's a very sweet man. A little silly, I think, but it only adds to his charm." At this, Kash gives a long, dramatic eye roll, drains the last of the coffee, and then looks down into the empty mug pitifully.

"Grog thinks there's something up with him," Vex says, a bit contemplatively. She rests her elbow on the table and sets her chin into her hand.

For as long as she's known Scanlan, which is actually a year or so at this point, she's only ever known the man to be happy and cheerful, bouncing excitedly and talking about his students and his shows, flirting outrageously but never aggressively, and always willing to lend a sympathetic ear. Vax is closer to him than she is, perhaps, but honestly that's true for nearly all of their mutual friends. Vax gravitates to people so much easier than she does; she never learned how to not keep a distance.

"Well," Zahra says, her voice soothing, though Vex isn't sure whether it's to her or to Kashaw, who's glaring at the coffee machine and muttering curses as if calling God down on it will make it brew faster, "if there is something wrong, I'm sure that having his friends around will help him."

"Yeah," Vex murmurs, "I hope so."

\-------

Speaking of people who should be married but aren't, Vex _still_ isn't entirely sure what the relationship is between Scanlan and Pike.

Vex isn't exactly the best person to be giving relationship advice; her longest one was also her most recent, and it had lasted a grand total of ten months. It had been an amicable and mutual split, though this was admittedly mostly because he'd gotten himself arrested. She still thinks about Jarett, sometimes. Anyway, the point is that she's never had the perfect, cookie-cutter relationship. Neither has her brother. Her parents certainly hadn't.

But Pike and Scanlan, it's just-- sometimes they flirt and smile and laugh and joke, dancing around each other like birds in spring, and sometimes Scanlan breaks off to go pick up random women at the bar while Pike just shakes her head in the background.

Hell, sometimes Pike _helps_ him pick up random women at the bar.

Shit, now that she thinks about it, between the two of them, and now Vax's weird attraction that borders on worship thing with Keyleth, she and Grog are probably the _normal_ ones of the group.

(She's not including Percy in this. She still doesn't know how she feels about that. When she's around him, she feels comfortable; it's not a feeling of security, really, or of safety, but of _familiarity_. They have a lot in common, she and Percy. The problem is that the things they have in common, the traits that they share --the secretiveness, the standoffishness, the difficulty to trust-- are ones that she doesn't particularly like about herself.)

\-------

When Grog gets out of his consult, he gets her attention by throwing his keys at her.

"What the _fuck!_ " she yelps, ducking her head away, and he lets out a loud, booming laugh that ends in a snort.

"Vax texted me," he says easily, going to scrub his hands at the sink; they're covered in graphite pencil stains along the palms and knuckles, something Vex is familiar with from sketching out ideas. "Since I'm just going right over to the Lamia for my shift after I finish here, you can borrow my car to go pick him up and I'll get it back from you guys there tonight."

"Wow, Grog," she says, touched and a bit surprised that he's letting her take his car without him being there, considering her bad luck with them lately. "Thanks!"

He grunts, picking at a bit of ink that's stuck beneath his thumbnail. "Not like you're going that far. Just fill up the gas tank when you're done and we'll call it even." She grabs his keys and her sketchbook and bustles from the break room, hearing him shout after her, "And don't fucking wreck it!"

She waves at him over her shoulder, says goodbye to Zahra, notes that Kashaw seems to have left for the day, and then sprints out into the rain, coat pulled over her head and sketches tucked protectively against her chest.

The streets are nearly empty, since it's barely midday and the rain is coming down so hard that she's got the wipers going at full speed. Still, it takes her nearly twenty minutes to drive across town to Keyleth's flower shop, Druid Craft.

The shop is right at the edge of the downtown area, where the town starts to become more residential, close enough to be within reasonable walking distance to other businesses to promote foot traffic, but not surrounded by any means. It's cute, and small, a dainty little thing that's offset by the great big oak tree behind it. With the tree framing the building, which is painted a cheerful spring green with vines crawling up the side of it, the whole display looks like something out of a fairy tale. It being the dead of winter, there are Christmas lights strung up through the tree and the vines, but Vex has never actually seen them lit; it probably uses too much electricity.

There's no actual parking lot to the shop itself, seeming to rely on the lots of other stores in the area, so Vex pulls up close to the curb and honks the horn. After a minute of nothing happening, though she can clearly see lights on within the shop, she honks again.

Another minute, and then she pulls out her phone.

**TO: VAX**  
_Im here, where are you_

When she get no reply, she cuts the engine and opens the door, slamming it behind her and rushing underneath the awning to the shop's entrance. When she slips in, a bell tingles above her head, announcing her, and she stops to sneeze as the smell of dozens of different kinds of flowers hit her.

The inside of the shop looks like a color bomb went off. Arrangements of every flower she can think of sit inside vases and on tables scattered about the room are collections of single stems, the hues vibrant contrasts against the overwhelming amount of _green_. Seeing this almost makes her want to follow Zahra's suggestion and pick up watercolor, just to see if she could make it look as good on paper or skin as it looks in real life.

Still, her next thought is that Vax spends all day in here arranging bouquets, which is just _hilarious_. Better than the alternative, of course, which is languishing in a prison cell, but still; the thought of Vax, temperamental, occasionally dour Vax, who spent the entirety of their teenage years wearing various shades of black and skulking around alleyways like a stray cat playing with _flowers_ all day is enough to send her into a fit of giggles.

"Vax?" she calls out, and hears something crash from the back room, and a muffled, "Mother _fuck!_ "

Vex walks towards the noise, but is stalled by something streaking out of the room she's walking to and brushing against her ankles as it goes. Jumping in surprise, she catches the tail end of a large, fluffy white cat as it scuttles beneath one of the wooden tables, only the tips of its whiskers poking out from underneath after it settles in.

"Damned cat," her brother says from inside the back room, and when Vex pokes her head in she sees him with a broom, sweeping up an empty vase that appears to have been knocked off of one of the shelves line the walls. Back stock, then, she thinks. Vax looks up at her and rolls his eyes. "You see where she went?"

"Beneath one of the tables," Vex says, leaning against the doorway and crossing her arms in amusement. "So that's why Trinket always seems so very interested in you when you come home."

"Unlikely," he says, wryly, picking up a few of the larger ceramic chunks with his hands and setting them into a trash can in a corner. "Minxy doesn't come close enough for me to smell like a cat, she hates me."

"I don't think cats are capable of love," Vex tells him, "which is why I got a dog."

He grunts in reply and empties the dustpan of the remains of the vase, then straights up and looks at her as if he's just realized that she was actually there. "How'd you get here?"

"Grog let me borrow his car again. I'm starting to feel like I'm taking advantage of him." Vax raises an eyebrow as he takes off his apron, which is another thing she occasionally gets the giggles over. "I mean," she clarifies, "not enough to stop. Just enough that I kind of feel bad about it."

"Tax season soon," he says with a shrug, hanging the apron up on a peg on the back of the door to the back stock room. "Percy's still sending you links to cars, right? Shit, Vex, you've got a mechanic offering to help you find a car, I'd take him up on it."

See, the thing is, Vex doesn't know how to explain to her brother what she feels about Percy, not in a way that he'd understand, that wouldn't make her look crazy. He's given her no reason not to trust him, not to take him at his word and for what he appears to be, which is a guy who's smart and sometimes sweet and seems genuinely interested in her, but it's just--

Vex has never, never in her _life_ , had someone who wasn't her brother genuinely interested in her without an ulterior motive. If Vex isn't trusting, then, well, she's got a damn good reason not to be.

As if to prove his point, her phone chimes through with a text alert, and when she opens the message, Percy's contact name glares at her on the screen. Vax glances over her shoulder at it, then gives her a knowing look even as she pushes him away for being nosy. Feeling the heat rising in her cheeks, she huffs at him, "Do your shit so we can leave, jackass."

She waits until Vax heads over to the register, which is an old, ugly vintage-looking thing that'd probably be worth more than all of the flowers in the shop combined if Keyleth got it refinished, ignoring the smirk he sends her way, before she opens the message.

**FR: PERCY**  
_What's the name of the bar that we're meeting at tonight?_

Well, that's simple and straightforward, and it helps her curtail the intensity of her blush as she types out the answer. Damn, but she's got to get a handle on this; crushes she can deal with, she's had crushes on people before, but usually they're just passing things that she can rationalize and get over fairly quickly. This... whatever it is, this attraction, this connection, with Percy is just a bit too much for her to be comfortable with.

**FR: PERCY**  
_What an interesting name. I'm looking forward to it. 8)_

She doesn't expect the smiley, and snorts, hard, when she sees it. Just-- what even the fuck. Vax glances up at her from where he's handwriting the till amount in a ledger with a raised eyebrow and the flush comes back to her cheeks, but she can't keep herself from snickering even more.

**TO: PERCY**  
_Why 8) why not just :)_

She hops up on the counter and faces her brother, ignoring his annoyed huff, and swings her legs back and forth as she's waits for both Vax to finish up, and for Percy's reply. Within a minute or so she gets the latter, though it looks like Vax is nearly done, if his look of concentration, tongue sticking out slightly as he tallies up the numbers, is any indication.

**FR: PERCY**  
_The 8 is my glasses, of course. I'm not going to text blind. That would be ridiculous._

"He is a dork," she announces to her brother, who glances up at her. She can't help the little giddy feeling in her chest, or the smile that curls at her lips; she has a feeling that Percy doesn't let himself loosen up that much, and she's pleased that he seems comfortable enough to do it with her. It's just-- Goddamn, but she's in trouble with this. "A massive, utter dork."

Vax shuts his ledger and tucks it up under the counter, leveling her with an amused smirk. "You're just now figuring this out?"

\-------

(Vex's second relationship was with a woman, though calling it a relationship would be a bit of a stretch, considering it was mostly just two months of drinking and fucking. Shayne was Vex's age, but wilder and with less temperance, less caution, and Vex, who at the time was still reeling from the disastrous end of her relationship with her father, fell into Shayne's near-hedonism with a sort of reckless abandon.

Shayne ran in the same circles that Vax ran in, those being typically illegal ones, the kind of circles that Vex tried to keep a distance from but sometimes slipped into anyway. It wasn't a particularly healthy relationship, or a long-lived one, but it's not one that Vex regrets, really.

Considering everything that'd happened with her father, it was probably what she'd needed at the time.)

\-------

The Laughing Lamia is what could generously be called a dive bar, if one is feeling exceptionally kind. Located at the outskirts of the business district in a little hole in the wall building, most of the bar's patrons are the kind of regulars who come to drink a hole in their pocket, where everybody knows everybody but nobody likes to talk.

The exception to this is every other Wednesday, when they have karaoke night, and the nights when Scanlan Shorthalt gets his posse together.

Scanlan himself has a fitting last name; he's what Vex's mother would have referred to as knee-high to a grasshopper. As if to balance out his unfortunate lack of height, he's got a personality that's nearly as loud as the outfits he wears, which are usually some shade of purple or pink. Vex isn't even sure how she and her brother met Scanlan, though honestly the man seems to know everyone, so they were bound to run into him at some point.

He's already sitting at the bar when Vex and Vax arrive, chatting animatedly with Grog, who's behind the bar and pouring him a big glass stein of whatever's on tap. When Vax whistles at them, both men swivel to look their way, and Scanlan's face breaks out in a blinding grin.

"The twins have arrived!" he says cheerfully, raising his glass to them, having to use both hands to lift it. Vex isn't sure how his body processes the alcohol so well, since he drinks so much of it and he's so tiny. She herself can hardly drink more than two bottles of beer, three on a good day, before her stomach starts to feel gross. She much prefers wine, or dark liquor when she feels like splurging, which is rarely. Scanlan pats the stools to either side of him, inviting them over, and Vex and her brother split to flank him, she on the left and he on the right.

"Pike's running late, but she should be here soon," he says, looking back and forth to grin at them both as Grog goes ahead and gets the twins' regular drinks (a pale ale for Vax, and a whiskey and ginger ale for Vex).

"Percy's on the way," Vex tells him, having received a text from him on the way over, and she sips at her drink. "That's the guy I invited, by the way."

"Keyleth's coming too," Vax says with a hum, and Vex turns to look at him, surprised. Her brother glances over at her and then shrugs, nonchalantly. "If you can invite yours, I can invite mine."

Scanlan gets that look on his face, the one that says he's about to say something suggestive and embarrassing, but Vex cuts him off with a glare before saying to her brother, "Percy's not my anything, except my friend."

"Why sister," Vax mock-gasps, placing a hand on his chest as if offended, "that's all that I meant!"

Her eyes narrow over her glass as she sips at it again, but Vax just smiles at her innocently.

"Seven people," Scanlan says, counting everyone who's coming off on his fingers. "It'll be a regular party, won't it? All we need now is Tiberius to show up."

There's a bit of an awkward silence that falls over the four of them suddenly, and Grog clears his throat and turns to assist another patron further down the bar. Vex stares down into her whiskey and out of the corner of her eye she watches Vax, on the other side of Scanlan, frown heavily before taking a gulp of his beer.

Tiberius is still a sore subject with them, has been for the last few months; his sudden, unexpected departure to return home to his parents, immediately following the massive fight he'd had with the other members of their ragtag group, has created a hole in the little makeshift family that seems to have collected Vex and her brother, leaving an aching bruise in them all that Vex wishes people would stop poking.

The quiet that follows this gives her an opportunity to really inspect Scanlan, to try and gauge his mood. Now that she's actually looking, she can see that his mouth is tight behind his smile, and his eyes, normally twinkling and bright, like he's perpetually laughing at some joke only he can hear, look exhausted in a way that she's never seen before. He's always tired when he prepares for a show, but this goes beyond that, she thinks.

Grog was right. Something's up.

The lull in conversation is interrupted by a throat clearing behind them, and all three of them turn to glance over their shoulders as one. Percy stands a few feet away, hands clasped behind his back and dressed in his usual fare of jeans and a button-up shirt, a jacket thrown over his shoulder, and he smiles once he has their attention. "Good evening," he greets, nodding at the twins. Vax raises his beer in a salute and Vex slides out of her seat to gesture at him to Scanlan.

"Ah, Scanlan, this is my friend--"

Percy steps forward, hand outstretched, and Scanlan takes it, looking a bit bemused but with a smile on his face. "Percival Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III," he says, with the quickness and practiced ease of someone who's spent a lot of time repeating it to people.

"You can call him Percy," Vex assures Scanlan, and Vax snorts into his beer bottle.

"Holy shit, you've got a name from hell," Scanlan says with a grin, shaking his hand. "Nice grip, though."

"Ah." Percy retracts his hand and runs it through his hair, and he smiles but it's a bit hard at the edges. "That'd be my father's influence, I think. He'd always tell me no one wanted to shake a limp wrist." When he catches Vex's eye the tightness that pulls at his features softens a little, the smile a touch more genuine. "Thanks for inviting me."

She nods, but anything she might have said in reply is drowned out by Scanlan saying abruptly, "Let's grab a booth, then, the bar's getting a bit crowded." He leads the way over to a table set in the corner, the only one that's large enough to seat a party of seven, Percy trailing behind to talk quietly but companionably with Vax. When Vex glances over her shoulder to look for Grog, he gives her a nod from where he's taking a patron's order at the bar.

Once they're seated, Scanlan grins at Percy, setting his elbow down on the table and resting his chin in his hand. Again, Vex only sees it because she's looking for it, but there's a tenseness about him, a nervous energy that seems to make him vibrate. His knee bounces anxiously, half-hidden beneath the table.

"I'm not sure if I actually introduced myself," he says, in that grand, showman way of his. "Scanlan Shorthalt, at your service. Though I also go by Burt Reynolds--"

Percy glances at Vex, who shakes her head. "Nobody calls him that."

"--and sometimes people call me Kingslayer."

Again, Percy looks at Vex for verification, and she sighs. "People do call him that, unfortunately."

He blinks a couple times as if unsure of how to respond to that, and Vax laughs. "They have karaoke competitions twice a month, and a few months ago Scanlan beat out this guy named Murghol who'd held the title for almost a year straight."

"He was an asshole and his wife was an asshole and I am clearly superior," Scanlan says haughtily, and Vex rolls her eyes.

She turns to face Percy, as if to murmur something to him, and he leans closer obligingly, a disbelieving smile on his face. "He only won because he charmed the judge," she faux-whispers, and Scanlan pulls an exaggerated frown. "He likes to replace words in songs to rhyme with people's names." She leans back, grinning at Scanlan cheekily, and continues, "It makes it very awkward to be friends with him in public."

" _Vex'ahlia_ ," Scanlan bursts into song, to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel's _Cecilia_ , " _you're breakin' my heart!_ "

Vex laughs, surprised and a bit embarrassed, but clearly not as surprised as Percy, who lets out a startled bark of laughter that he tries to immediately stifle. His eyes widen further as he looks up over and behind Vex, and when she turns to follow his vision she sees Grog standing at her back, arms crossed and frowning down at him.

"Who the hell are you?" he grunts, nudging Vax in the shoulder to get him to scoot so that he can sit on Vex's other side, leaning over the table to give Percy the stink-eye.

"Percival von Blah Blah," Scanlan chirps helpfully, and Vex drops her head into her hands with a groan. When she looks up at him, Vax is just watching this unfold with the meanest, shit-eattingest grin on his face.

"Grog, this is my friend, Percy. Percy, this is Grog, one of my mentors at my tattoo parlor."

Percy seems to regain his composure and extends his hand again, leaning close to Vex to reach around her, his chest warm against her shoulder. After he shakes Grog's hand he pulls away with a wince, flexing his fingers. "Pleasure," he says, and Grog just grunts again.

"Don't worry," Vax assures him, smirking into his beer bottle, which by now is almost empty. "He's always like this."

"The testosterone here is overwhelming," Vex announces, knocking back the rest of her drink. She's nudges Percy's arm with her elbow as she rises from her seat. "I'm getting a refill. You want anything?"

He blinks at her once again before nodding hesitantly to Vax. "I'll have the same as him, I suppose."

She nods and clamors over Grog's lap, elbowing him in the chest when he wolf whistles at her and feeling immensely gratified when it knocks the breath out of him with a wheeze. Kern's tending the bar now, and he gives her the stink-eye as she approaches.

"He does know that he's still technically on shift, right?" the giant brute of a man huffs, nodding back over Vex's shoulder to the table where Grog is undoubtedly making an ass of himself.

"Hell if I'm gonna be the one to tell him that," she says, setting down her glass. "A bit more whiskey this time, Grog always skimps me."

" _Oooh_ , there you are!"

Vex startles slightly and turns to see Keyleth rushing over to her, red hair wild and windswept from the chilly night air outside, her nose and cheeks flushed. As soon as she's gotten close enough she pulls Vex into a hug, surprising her once more, and Vex awkwardly pats her on the back with one hand. Keyleth pulls away with an excited smile. "I was afraid I'd walked right by the place, and it's cold out there!"

Vex stares at her, astonished. "Good lord, darling, did you _walk_ here?"

Blinking, Keyleth cocks her head in confusion, reminding Vex very suddenly of Trinket when he hears a toy squeak from across the room. "Well, yeah. If I'm gonna be drinking, I can't drive home, can I?"

Vex opens her mouth to reply, and then shuts it and shakes her head. "We'll give you a ride home afterwards," she promises instead, and collects hers and Percy's drink. "We're sitting over there," she says, and points out their table. Vax, who's turned in his seat at the booth to see what's taking her so long, sees the two of them and lifts his hand, his face lighting up. Percy and Scanlan both follow the motion curiously. "Get your drink and meet us over there, yeah?"

Keyleth nods excitedly and turns to Kern, who looks supremely uninterested.

Walking back over to the group, Vex sets Percy's beer in front of him and then shimmies back over Grog's legs, turning to give him a sharp glare just in time to see him lift a hand to palm her ass. She steps on his foot hard when she settles back into her seat, then rolls her eyes at Percy when he chuckles at them.

"So how'd the rest of the day go at the shop?" she asks Grog, shivering slightly against the kick of the whiskey as she sips at her drink.

"I kind of set the break room on fire," Grog says, and she inhales her drink and chokes as it threatens to come out of her nose.

" _How--_ " she hisses, coughing into a fist as Percy hands her a napkin anxiously and Scanlan laughs like a hyena.

"I was heating up a burrito, right, and the tin foil caught on fire."

Scanlan laughs even harder, nearly screaming from the force of it now, and Vax takes a deep, long breath and holds it. Percy's eyes have gone wide behind his glasses and his lips are tight like he's biting them to keep from saying anything. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him reach into his pocket and pull out his phone with one hand, thumb hitting the screen rapidly without looking.

"Grog," she gasps, her eyes tearing up from the burn of the whiskey in her sinuses, "why the _fuck_ did you put tin foil in the microwave?"

Grog frowns at her heavily and crosses his arms. "Kash told me that it'd make it heat up faster."

At this point, Keyleth has appeared with a few shot glasses on a tray and is standing nervously to the side, glancing at the three men she doesn't know and shuffling from foot to foot until Vax pushes Scanlan over to make room for her beside him. As she's sitting down and introductions are being made, Vex feels her pocket vibrate, and, sniffling and clearing her throat, she pulls out her phone to check it.

**FR: Percy**  
_Your friends are incredibly weird._

She turns to glance at him and sees him looking at Keyleth politely, phone nowhere to be seen. She leans in slightly, and just like before he does as well, coming closer to meet her halfway. "You get used to it," she says quietly, and the corner of his lips turn up.

"I'm sure," he murmurs back, then reaches out again to introduce himself to the newest member of their little party.

"What are you drinking, anyway?" Vax asks, lifting one of the shot glasses Keyleth had brought with her, only to have the red-head snatch it out of his hand with a smile.

"Tequila," she says, and then knocks back all three shots in quick succession, leaving everyone else at the table in stunned silence.

\-------

Family is like. This weird, nebulous concept to Vex. It exists, she knows it does. Obviously. And other people have it, scores and scores of people have families, parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and just pissloads of people they're related to who care about them.

Vex, who's really only ever had her brother, often views family as this sort of unobtainable goal. She'd had a mother, once, but she'd died when Vex was young. And her father-- Yeah. Best not to get into that. Let the past stay in the past, and all that.

Sometimes, though, when she's with her friends, when they're drinking and laughing and smiling, when Vax loses that tension in his shoulders and when Grog gets so smashed that he giggles at everything, when Vex herself gets just relaxed enough to let down her walls, just a bit...

Well, maybe it's cheesy, but fuck it. Vex feels like family isn't so unobtainable of a goal after all, you know?

\-------

Percy and Keyleth, to Vex's surprise, get on almost immediately, striking up a conversation about horticulture that she's either had too much or too little whiskey to follow properly.

"Like pigs in mud, those two, yeah?" Grog smirks, throwing an eyebrow wiggle at Vax, who just rolls his eyes, unconcerned, as Scanlan frowns down at his phone.

"Pike can't make it tonight," he says after a moment, tucking it back into his pocket and then staring into his glass stein, which is on it's third refill.

Throughout the night, Vex has noticed his tells; the way his eyes linger on the door, how he's the quickest to laugh at a joke but rarely makes his own, the way his fingers flex open and closed every few seconds like he doesn't know what to do with them.

"What? Why?" Vax asks, drawing Keyleth and Percy's attention over to them with the disappointment in his voice.

"Couldn't get her shift tonight covered, I guess." Scanlan shrugs, clearly upset by it but trying to play it off. "It's fine, hospital's more important, anyway."

"Is she a doctor?" Keyleth asks curiously, leaning into Vax's shoulder and blinking, the tequila having had a delayed reaction but now obviously hitting her hard.

"ER nurse," he answers her, gently pushing her upright and tucking a bit of her hair behind her ear so it doesn't fall onto the table. "She's got some weird stories, too, you should hear some of them."

"So what do you do?" Keyleth asks Scanlan, startling him out of the sullen silence he'd fallen into.

Vex watches as he visibly forces himself to perk up, and he smiles at her, but it's shaky. She cuts her eyes over to Grog, who meets her gaze and gives a small, short nod, a frown pulling at his lips. "I'm a teacher at the high school," he says, drawing himself up in his seat, and a bit of genuine pride enters his voice. "I'm the theatre director, and I also help out with the band classes. We just finished up a run of a few one act shows, and we have a big musical at the end of every year. This year we're doing The Sound of Music, you guys should come see it."

"My younger sister Whitney was in that, years ago," Percy says suddenly, a nostalgic smile crossing over his face. Vex hasn't really kept track of how many beers he's had, but it's been at least three. "She played Liesl and was so _upset_ that she didn't get Maria. God, I heard _Sixteen Going Seventeen_ so many times that I think _I_ could hit the high notes."

Scanlan leans forward, eyes bright. "How long ago? It's my second time doing the show here, and the last time was a while back. Maybe she was in the first run I did."

"Ah," Percy sighs, the smile slipping off his face, "that wasn't here, it was back North, back-- hmm, where I'm from."

"Oh. Still, you should bring her to see it," Scanlan says as Vex eyes them both, wondering if this sister Whitney is the one who wrote the script for the tattoo she'd done for Percy.

"She died," he says, voice calm but tight, and Vex's heart clenches for him. She knows all too well the loss of family, after all. "Several years ago, I'm afraid."

"Oh," Scanlan says again, subdued and blinking in confusion.

There's a long moment of tense silence before Percy stands, nudging Vex to the side gently. "If you'll excuse me," he says, and Grog slides out of the booth with a shrug to let him pass. "I think I might need some air."

Vex catches his wrist as he gently steps over her, and he pauses to look down at her fingers wrapped around him. Slowly his eyes raise to meet hers and they stare at each other for a few seconds before she lets go. As soon as he's released Percy leaves, making his way through the bar, far less crowded than it was when they'd gotten there, and exits through the front door.

"Well, I'm just terrible with words lately, aren't I?" Scanlan says with a sigh, dropping his head into his hands.

Vex glances over at Vax, who's now holding a dozing Keyleth upright, and then looks at Grog.

"Everything alright, Scanlan?" she asks warily, and he lifts his head to look at her, blinking rapidly.

"Fine," he says, voice high and with a little tremble. "Just fine. Nothing wrong at all."

"Liar," Vax accuses, but without much venom behind it. One of his arms is slung around Keyleth's shoulder, and when she mumbles something into his sleeve he hoists her up a bit higher. "Something's going on, we can all tell."

Scanlan wraps his hands around the handle of his stein and grips it until his knuckles turn white, eyes downcast. "That obvious, huh?" he asks with a self-deprecating laugh, lifting his drink to finish the last of it.

Vex, who's on her third drink herself and is starting to well and truly feel the effects of it, leans forward and rests her hand against his arm. Unlike Percy, Scanlan doesn't pull away, just lifts his eyes up to blink at her morosely. "To your friends, yeah," she answers, and after a moment Scanlan gives a heavy sigh.

"I was really kind of hoping that Pike would be here for this, but. Well, you can't always get what you want." He leans back in his seat and runs a hand down his face, then speaks through his fingers without looking at them. "So I found out last week that one of my kids is... well, my _kid._ "

There's a beat of silence, and then Vex says blankly, "Beg pardon?" at the same time that Grog gasps out "You _what?_ "

"Wossat?" Keyleth asks, jerking her head upright briefly before letting it down back down against Vax's shoulder.

"My kid," Scanlan says miserably, in a tone of voice that just makes Vex's skin fucking _itch_. "Like, biologically, my kid. Mine."

"You teach high school, and one of your students is your kid, and you _just_ found out?" Vex asks, voice coming out harder than she means for it to, it's just-- No, fuck it. She's not thinking about this right now.

"She's a sophomore," Scanlan says weakly, "named Kaylie. Back when I first moved here, before I started teaching, I, ah, was in a relationship with this woman briefly. After we broke up I didn't see her again and I didn't think about about it, but apparently she moved back home to be with her parents because I. Got her pregnant." He finally pulls his hand back and pinches at the bridge of his nose, sighing through it heavily. "And now she's back, and I've got a fucking kid."

It's not the same, it's not, but it sounds too goddamn familiar, that disappointment in his voice, the embarrassment, the _shame_ , and it's not like the twins go around shouting their family history for the world to hear, it's not like Scanlan knows this is a sore spot for her, but that doesn't make it hurt any less. "You don't have to say it like it's ruined your life," she says sharply, the burn of the whiskey at the back of her throat loosening her tongue. "Think about how she feels."

"She doesn't even know yet," Scanlan mutters, rubbing at his eyes. "She doesn't know," Vex's hands clench into fists, "and she's in my class," they start to tremble but she bites her lip, "and I have to see her every day," Vax looks over at her with wary concern, knowing too well how she feels regarding this kind of subject, "and her mother wants us to tell her, and I just don't know _how_." Scanlan glances up at her and must read something on her face, she must not being hiding her anger as well as she thought, because his voice goes a bit defensive as he says, "I mean, this is kind of a big fucking deal, Vex. This is a huge life changing thing."

"Not if you don't treat it like a fucking burden," she snaps, hefting herself up and climbing over Grog in as dignified a way as she can. Scanlan visibly deflates and looks back down at his hands.

"I didn't ask for this to happen," he says, weary, and Vex stops to glare down at him.

"Yeah, well, neither did she," she replies, and ignores her Vax's startled cry of "Sister!" as she storms out of the bar.

The air is freezing around her, her breath misting out into the night, but some cosmic being must be smiling at her because at least the bloody rain has stopped. Vex paces outside of the bar a few steps, shivering and angry and not quite sure why she'd let herself get so worked up.

It's just-- it's just, goddamn, but she knows how that feels. To be a scared girl without a father to suddenly just fucking have one, and one that hates her, no less, one that's embarrassed by her, that just sees her as a fucking _problem._

Her relationship with her own father is still such a wound inside of her, one that never scabbed over properly. How many of their troubles would be solved if their father would just step in and show the slightest amount of support? Vex wouldn't be stuck bumming rides off her boss. She wouldn't have had to scramble to put up Vax's bond money all on her own. Shit, he probably wouldn't have been arrested in the first place if their fucking father just gave a damn about them.

Vex lets herself stomp and pull her hair and rage for a minute or two before she forces herself to take a deep breath and actually _think_ for a second.

Scanlan is... Scanlan is a way better guy than her own father, for one thing. He's actually honestly nice, and he cares about people more than he should. He's probably just. Overwhelmed. Fuck, yeah, and that'd be understandable, too. Waking up one day and finding out one of the kids you teach is your own flesh and blood.

Shit. She should probably go apologize.

She contemplates just walking the fuck home instead, regardless of what she'd said to Keyleth earlier, but she'd left her jacket inside, and already she's trembling from the cold, her skin raised into gooseflesh on her arms. She leans back against the wall, as far from the door as she can get while still keeping an eye on it just in case her brother comes chasing after her, and rests her head back against the brick.

Right within range of her hearing, she picks up on the sound of a voice muttering and footsteps from the alleyway to the side, coming closer to her, and she tenses, the muscles in her arms jumping from the nerves of her fight with Scanlan. After a moment, the steps retreat, and then within a few seconds come back; someone pacing down the alleyway, she guesses, and is about to head back into the bar, her pride be damned, when she realizes that the voice is one she recognizes.

She stills, and presses further against the wall, inching closer to the alley.

"...I know. I know. Tell him to keep looking."

Percy?

Vex holds her breath, feeling her heartbeat trip and stumble in her chest. Percy, talking to someone. On the phone? Obviously, since there's no one else speaking that she can hear.

"I know, Cass. It's alright, Archie knows what he's doing." A pause as whoever is on the other end speaks, and Percy's steps grow closer. He sounds... different. Calm, quiet, softer than she's ever heard him speak before, not in volume but in inflection, voice pitched low and soothing. It's sad, almost, a low-key longing in his words like he's trying to be comforting but isn't sure how. "If we both just keep our heads down and let him handle this, then neither of us have to get involved." A short bark of laughter. "The waiting is the worst part."

As he starts to pace away from her, Vex risks peeking around the corner of the alley, just for a second. Percy's back is to her and there's smoke curling against his silhouette, drifting up in the light of a streetlamp. For a moment, a split second, she almost thinks that it's _him_ , but then he turns, still not facing her but letting her get a better look at his profile, and she sees that he's got a cigarette in the hand that's not holding his phone up against his ear.

He takes a long drag from it and exhales smoothly, watching the ringlets of smoke disappear into the night, and Vex pulls back around to her side of the wall quickly. She had no clue that he smoked, she's never smelled it on him before, but clearly there's shit about Percy that she didn't know at all.

"How's school been?" There's a long pause as he listens to the person on the other end of the line, pacing closer again, close enough that she can hear the long inhale of him taking another drag from his cigarette. "Well, you're smart, you can handle it. Just take care of yourself, alright? What matters is that you're happy there."

It's. It's weird, hearing Percy like this, the candid gentleness in his voice, the softness to his words. It makes her feel bad, almost, for being so suspicious of him, for trying so hard to find a reason to not trust him. She's got a gut feeling, yeah, but _shit_ her own brother is a parolee, has done tons of terrible things, and Vex herself isn't exactly a saint in that regard. It's a little sobering, almost more so than the cold, to think that people could be judging her brother with as much scrutiny as she does Percy.

Shitty, stupid people doing shitty, stupid things.

"I should probably go, I'm out with some friends." He snorts in response to whatever the other person has said. "Yes, Cass, I do have friends. We're at a bar. Yes, yes, I know, I'm watching myself." Another short pause. Quietly, as quietly as she knows how, she creeps back along the wall, closer to the entrance of the bar. If she's going to get caught, she doesn't want him to know that she's been listening. "I know. Archie's doing the best he can. Just hold on a little bit longer and we can put all of this behind us. Take care of yourself, okay? If you need me then just call, I can leave any time. Love you, too."

Just as she's reached the door, Percy rounds the corner, head tucked down and hands cupped around his mouth as he lights up another cigarette. When his head lifts up he catches sight of her and stops, the light from the streetlamp reflecting off of his glasses as he blinks at her.

"Vex?" he asks curiously, flicking ash off to the side, his voice back to the normal mild interest that she's grown used to, not a hint of that gentle, comforting softness he'd had when speaking to this Cass person. "Why ever are you out here? Did you leave your jacket inside?"

"Just had to get away for a second," she replies on reflex, trying not to let her embarrassment show on her face. Keeping him at arm's length, being so suspicious of him, it just seems kind of silly right now, the fear of him that she's carried lessened by the thought of his similarities to her brother, and she can't help but feel a bit ashamed by it. She's got a vibe, but truthfully he's been nothing but kind to her. Maybe she should give him the benefit of the doubt. Besides, if the affection in his voice when speaking to the person on the phone is any indication, it seems like he's already in a relationship with someone else. Maybe his friendliness towards her has been just that-- friendliness, and nothing more. "It's, ah, complicated. I might have gotten into a fight with Scanlan."

He frowns down at her and shrugs one arm out of his own jacket, then seems to realize he's still holding his cigarette. "Oh, shit," he says, as if startled at himself, and it's one of the few times she's heard him curse and she snorts despite herself. "Sorry, it's a terribly bad habit, one that I seem to just continuously kick and then pick back up." He switches hands and finishes taking off his coat, holding it out to her in offering.

She stares at it for a long, long moment, before slowly taking it from him and pulling it on. It smells like Percy, like motor oil and something stuffy that reminds her of old papers, and now like smoke, and it's too warm, too comfortable, too much like something she could let herself get used to, too much like the man himself.

"Do you have any more?" she asks, nodding at his cigarette, and he frowns again and shakes his head.

"No, this was my last one. I didn't know you smoked. Was it that bad of an argument?"

"I don't, usually," she says, but the whiskey is sitting wrong in her stomach, and guilt is creeping up in her heart, guilt for what she'd said to Scanlan and guilt for how she's treated Percy. "Bad habits, you know."

He holds it up and seems to consider it for a moment before handing that over as well. "We could share," he offers, and her nose crinkles up instinctively.

"That doesn't seem very sanitary," she argues, and Percy's eyebrow raises.

"Says the woman who gives illegal tattoos at college keg parties," he says, and she thinks about that for a second before nodding and taking a drag.

It's been a while, years even, since she smoked a cigarette, and it feels weird and wrong; she coughs the smoke out and Percy reaches out to put a hand against the small of her back, steadying her, and then taking it back when she waves him away. Her second pull is much smoother, the taste of the smoke in her mouth nostalgic.

"Tastes like my early twenties," she rasps, and hands it back, "except better quality. I only smoked the cheaper shit."

He laughs, and the two of them lean against the wall outside the bar in companionable silence, both of them lost in their own thoughts for a minute. Vex knows she's going to have to think about this harder, when she's sober, when she's of sounder mind, and it's-- it's not exactly heartbreak, not really, but perhaps some milder form of it, some sort of bitter disappointment to know that Percy has someone, somewhere that he loves. She wasn't wholly interested, not really, not completely invested, but. Well. It'd been a nice thought to hold on to, for a while.

"So what did the two of you argue about?" he asks curiously, and then backpedals, "if you don't mind my asking, that is. Sorry, that was terribly nosy."

"No, it's fine. It's just... well, like I said, it's complicated. Family stuff, I guess." When he passes the nearly-spent cigarette over to her, she takes a long drag from it and then drops it to the ground and grinds it under her heel. "I probably overreacted. I have a tendency to do that, I guess."

"I'm sure it was justified," Percy hums, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. He must be cold out here now that he's given her his jacket. Just another thing for her to be guilty about, she supposes. "Well, whatever it was, I'm glad that you invited me out. I've been pretty secluded until recently." He looks down at his feet as if recalling something, some memory that tugs his lips up into a slightly melancholy smile. "I haven't ever really had an abundance of friends. Yours are... interesting. Nice."

Vex huffs out a laugh, still tasting smoke on the back of her tongue. "Even though Grog set our place of work on fire and Scanlan sang no less than three times within an hour?"

He looks at her and the somber tilt to his face drops until he's just smiling at her, eyes bright behind his glasses. "I rather enjoyed the singing, actually. Especially that first bit, I've always liked Simon and Garfunkel."

Vex, whose tastes have always run a bit more bluegrass, rolls her eyes. "You would, wouldn't you?"

Percy grins at her and then surprises her by singing, in a deeper baritone than she'd expect from him and, endearingly, slightly off-key, " _Hello darkness, my old friend._ "

She stares at him and then laughs, harder than she means to, propping herself up against the brick and throwing her head back from the force of it. His chuckles follow shortly after, his shoulders hunched against the cold, and Vex feels something inside of her break off and drift away, some dark part of her that held on to that suspicion of him for so long. 

Just a man, she thinks. Just a man who made some choices, and some of them were probably bad. Just a man like her brother.

"I should probably apologize to Scanlan," she says finally, when she's caught her breath. "And it's bloody cold out here besides. Let's go inside, darling?"

"Indeed," Percy says, a smile still on his face, and opens the door for her before following her through.

\-------

Jarett isn't perfect, but honestly he's probably the closest that someone like Vex is going to get.

They don't date, not really, not in the conventional way; they don't go out to lunch together or buy each other gifts. She's never met his parents and he likewise doesn't have much interest in meeting her friends. In fact, the two of them share very little in common beyond a mutual attraction and a general distaste for relationships, and also a love of movies that have archers in them.

She's seen Avengers so many times now that she's basically got Jeremy Renner's face memorized.

They're playing Mario Kart in their pajamas one day, her in one of his too-big shirts and not much else and him in a pair of sweats that have seen better days, when he turns to her after a match and says, "Did Vax tell you about the place we've been casing?"

He and Vax run together a lot, she knows, a fact which has never failed to make her blood go cold whenever they go out on a job. Vax takes point usually, with Jarett providing the distraction when such things are necessary. He's charismatic and beautiful, with honey-gold eyes that pull people in and make them want to trust him. It's dangerous from a relationship aspect, but Vex knows that it works to get people out of their homes, to keep attention on him so that Vax can quietly jimmy a lock or open a window.

He's even given her pointers on it and she helps, sometimes, when she feels brave enough, talking people into distraction when a job is difficult enough to require both of her boys.

"No," she answers, a bit hesitantly; Vax has always been unwilling to include her in his jobs, especially now that they're older, now that he's good enough that her presence is less of a requirement and more of a detriment to his success. She doesn't mind, not really. She's good at talking circles around people but she couldn't pick a lock for the life of her. "What is it?"

Jarett stretches, his long arms reaching out over his head, muscles shifting beneath the caramel skin of his arms. "Some rich fellow, too much money for his own good. Vax thinks he can disable the security alarms long enough to slip in and take some choice items."

"Oh?" Vex asks curiously, setting down her controller and climbing into his lap, smirking down at him when his hands fall to rest on her hips. "Are you and my brother going white-collar now then, darling?"

"His wife has gorgeous jewelry," he says as an answer, leaning in to mouth at the skin of her neck. It's lazy and comfortable, the way she feels relationships should be, a familiarity that's left after all of the intensity has burned away. She can feel his smile, lips against her as he sucks a kiss into her clavicle. "I know how much you like your trinkets."

"Do I now?" He dips lower, breath warm at her cleavage where his shirt falls low on her chest. "I like to think I'm a rather practical person, in fact."

He hums and lifts his eyes to meet hers, and she bites her lip and presses in a bit closer. "Ah, dearest, you are, but imagine a pearl necklace, imagine diamond earrings."

"I have absolutely nowhere to wear things like that to," she informs him, nonetheless delighted by the thought. It's silly, it's stupid, and she'd never expect it, but still. It's nice to dream about, anyway. "You two should stick to cash registers. Money'd get us further."

He pinches her thigh and laughs when she jumps, and she leans down to kiss him hard, glad that her brother's not home for once. "But I can't help but dream big. Vax is convinced he can do it, and I believe him."

Vex huffs and bites at him, grinning when he growls in response. "You're going to get arrested one day, and I am going to laugh, because I won't be coming for conjugal visits."

"Yes you will," he says, "you'll miss me too much." She shrieks, surprised, as he suddenly tips her over onto the couch and pins her there.

"I would not!" she laughs, and then he distracts her so thoroughly that she can't think to continue arguing.

It wouldn't matter, she's lying anyway.

\-------

(When Jarett gets arrested, it's-- she--

It's fine. It sucks, but it's fine. He doesn't actually expect anything from her, which is good, because she doesn't have all that much to give. Vex moves on, because there's not much else she can do, and because she's good at that.

She's used to disappointment.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> meanwhile vax be like holding up a snoring keyleth and comforting a crying scanlan like "yes i know this is stressful for you --kiki stop drooling on me-- but my sISTER"


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a couple notes before the chapter:  
> firstly, some right shit has happened in the last couple weeks, thus the absence. i usually try to update at least _something_ once a week, so this long of a break from writing has been difficult, but unfortunately out of my control. between workplace difficulties and a recent death in the family, i haven't had much time or energy to write. i know i said i'd update the woods next, but i've been sitting on the first 3~k of this chapter for longer and i wanted to at least update something, and frankly while i love the prose-y writing style i've taken up for the woods it can be pretty emotionally draining on me, and normally i don't mind that but considering life circumstances at the moment and the subject matter of the next chapter of that fic i just haven't had the will to work on it recently. my bad, sorry sorry, i promise i am working on it, just more slowly than i'd intended.
> 
> secondly, i don't typically include trigger warnings in my fics, especially if i feel like the content i write is fairly typical of what happens in canon (ie violence, language, ect), but i'd like to include a TW for a reference to implied non-con. i tried to purposefully write it vague enough to be left up to reader interpretation, but it's still there. on that note, if i ever write something that you feel needs a TW and i don't include one, please let me know!
> 
> anyways. my bad for the wait! enjoy car antics.

See, here's the thing about Vex: she's pretty good at keeping secrets.

It's not that she _likes_ keeping them, exactly. It's just that sometimes there's shit that she doesn't want people to know. That's not to say that she wouldn't share some information, but it's surprising how many things she's been able to keep entirely to herself just because people don't think to _ask_.

For instance, did you know that Vex briefly entertained the idea of going to college? Because she did. She even applied to one or two, the ones in the area that didn't require application fees, or where the fees were small enough that she could justify paying them. She'd wanted to study business and financing, to the surprise of no one; she's never been the smartest of folk but she's always had a mind for numbers. Kashaw can joke all he wants, but if Vex ever actually had the money to play the stock market she'd probably do pretty good.

She doesn't like to talk about that, mostly because she's kind of embarrassed by it, especially with Pike, Scanlan, and Percy. After all, Pike _still_ attends classes while working a full time job, Scanlan is a teacher, and Percy... well, clearly Percy's got some sort of higher education, if not a full-on degree. Mechanical work isn't an easy thing to just pick up one day, even she knows that, and what little she's heard of his family life suggests that he probably wasn't taught by either of his parents.

There are darker secrets she keeps, though. Her's and Vax's, obviously, though at this point most of their friends know that he's a parolee even if they don't know exactly what he did to land his ass in jail. Who her father is, because that's a can of worms that she really doesn't want to open right now. The whole illegal tattoo thing. She doesn't _think_ Zahra or Grog would bust her balls for it, but she's not willing to tempt fate by letting them find out when she doesn't know if they'd kick her out of her apprenticeship over it.

And the big one, the one Vax doesn't even know. The fact that she ran away when she was sixteen.

Oh, she came back, obviously. She was really only gone for about a night. Vax was out prowling with his posse and their father was out doing fuck-all knows what, and Vex was-- Vex was having a bad time.

Hitching anywhere isn't a good idea, and especially when you're a sixteen year old alone at night, but her mom's was really only a few towns away, and maybe she'd get picked up by somebody nice. She had a bit of cash on her, she could pay them back.

Maybe she got picked up by somebody nice. Maybe she didn't. Maybe a couple friendly guys agreed to take her halfway, maybe they told her to keep the cash, not to worry about it.

Maybe after an hour or two they started asking for something else. Maybe she said no. Maybe they eventually got tired to hearing no or, maybe, she eventually got tired of saying it.

Maybe one of them tried something. Maybe she had one of Vax's knives in her pocket.

Maybe somebody got hurt. Maybe it was her. Maybe it was them.

Are you good at keeping secrets?

Vex is pretty good at keeping secrets.

\-------

"Hmm," Percy says after about fifteen minutes of poking around under the hood. "No. What about the next one?"

The car salesman visibly deflates, brows furrowed as he lifts his clipboard and scratches through the car they'd just looked at. Vex almost feels bad for him; over the last hour that she and Percy have been on the lot checking out cars, the man has gone from annoyingly perky to despondent, and he probably can't wait for him to leave.

"What's wrong with that one?" Vex asks quietly, peering over Percy's shoulder to look at the engine. It all looks the same to her, the exact same as every other car that they've looked at that he's axed. She doesn't mean it to be petulant or impatient, she just honestly wants to know what he's seeing that she can't, and thankfully he seems to understand that, leaning in closer to her so that he can match her soft tone so the salesman can't hear.

"It's just old. It doesn't look like it's been worked on for a while, it'll probably run fine for five or six months and then you'll have to replace half the car. Look," he murmurs, and points down at something that she couldn't name for the life of her, "the radiator hose is so old the curving is warped."

"Percy," she says with a sigh, though she's smiling when she shakes her head, "it looks exactly like the last car to me."

"Which is why I'm here," he replies. "Replacing a hose isn't that big of an issue, but when a bunch of small things like that go wrong, the repair cost starts to add up." She sighs again, heavier, and he nudges her side with his elbow.

"That was actually the last one," the salesman says suddenly, and both Vex and Percy turn to look at him. He's got an oddly hopeful expression, like maybe they'll finally leave, and Vex lifts a hand to her mouth to hide a smirk.

Car shopping is never _fun_ , exactly, but this has certainly been the most entertaining experience she's had. She's thankful for Percy's help too, since clearly she's got no clue what she needs to be looking for. Vax is equally helpless with cars, having always relied on his bike or bumming rides off of friends to get places. Mechanics the twins are not.

"Unfortunate," Percy says, scratching at his chin. He's forgone shaving again, something that happens with such unscheduled frequency that Vex has determined that he just honestly forgets to do it sometimes, and his fingernails rasp against the stubble in a way that catches her attention until she realizes that she's staring and then forces herself to look away.

"Quite," the salesman agrees, not seeming unhappy with the circumstance at all, and he all but hustles them back to where Percy's truck is parked. "We do get more stock in every week," he says as they walk, half-reluctantly, as if he doesn't actually want to invite them back but is forced to for job security.

"We'll keep that in mind," Percy assures him, opening the passenger-side door for Vex, who blinks in surprise before shrugging and pulling herself up into the seat. Percy's truck is always fun to ride in because she's only ever driven sedans that sit low to the ground, and his shocks are so good that she hardly ever feels bumps when they hit them.

Hey, she's a simple woman with simple pleasures, and riding in the truck makes her feel tall.

"On to the next one, then?" Percy asks once he's started the engine, and pulls his own list out of the glove box, glancing over it. They've already been to two other lots today, not even mentioning the two private sellers off Craigslist they've visited, and he scratches this lot off his list with a slight frown. There's not that many more places they can visit in the area, and Vex has been trying to stay local in her search since she's got limited free time and doesn't want to drag Percy all over creation just to help her out, but finding a car in her price range that also meets Percy's approval has proven to be exceptionally difficult.

"Maybe we can take a break for a bit?" she suggests, clicking her seat belt into place. "I sort of haven't eaten since like. A cereal bar this morning." As if to punctuate this, her stomach growls abruptly, loud enough that Percy's eyebrow raises, and she clears her throat with a blush. "I'll buy yours, you've gone out of your way to help me out."

"No need," he says, backing out of the lot and pulling back onto the highway. "I'm happy to assist, and it looks like you need the help, honestly. Do you know _anything_ about cars?"

Vex looks over at him with a deadpan glare, and he very obviously swallows a smirk, struggling to contain the quirk of his lips and just slightly failing.

"You get in them and they go," she says. "Or, they're supposed to, anyway."

"Indeed," Percy says agreeably, clearly correctly sensing that this answer is the only one that's not going to get him in trouble. He then promptly gets himself in trouble by continuing, "Truly, though, did your father or uncle or _someone_ not teach you anything about them? I know your brother is shite with mechanics, too, so I can only assume that you come by it honestly, but still. Even _base_ knowledge is something everyone should have."

Vex clears her throat and looks out the window. It's-- she's, ah, she's determined to not let this upset her. She's had a good day today, and Percy is fun to hang out with, and he can't help his ignorance with her family history. This is-- this is not his fault.

"My father wasn't exactly the type of guy to," she pauses briefly, trying to think of how to word it. "Hmm, to impart wisdom, I guess. Mostly he just kept us fed, sort of. Very hands-off parenting. Beyond that, it was just me and Vax."

"Ah," Percy says, a little subdued, as if realizing he's steered the conversation into dangerous waters and is now trying to guide it back. "I apologize, I should have gathered as much from what Vax has mentioned in group. I _am_ sorry, Vex."

When she looks back over at him, he's watching her for a moment, expression earnest, before turning back to the road. "It's fine," she says after a pause, forcing a smile onto her face, trying to show him there's no hard feelings. “Though it does make me wonder what it is, exactly, that my brother talks about regarding our family life with a bunch of strangers.”

Percy shifts uncomfortably, glancing over at her once more. “Ah-- not, not anything in explicit detail, I assure you. Mostly he talks about, um, jobs, I suppose. That’s what he calls them, anyway. Jobs that he’s done in the past. He keeps a tight lid on personal stuff, but then I suppose that we all do.”

There’s silence for a minute or so, not awkward so much as heavy, like neither of them are quite sure where to go from there. Finally, Percy clears his throat pointedly and says, “You’re hungry though, yes? Anything in particular we should be looking for?”

“Hmm,” Vex thinks for a moment, glad for the distraction. She’s still not entirely comfortable talking to him about matters this personal, this close to home, even though she’s making an honest attempt to curb her natural suspicion of him. (It’s not so much a statement about her trust, or lackthereof, in _him_ , though. Vex has problems talking to _anyone_ about this kind of stuff.) “I’m not that picky. You’re the one going out of your way to help me out, I figure you should be the one that decides.”

“It really isn’t a huge imposition, you know,” he says, voice light as he clicks on his turn signal and switches lanes, and when she looks at him his eyes are pointed firmly ahead. It might just be a trick of the light, but his ears look redder than usual. Surely she’s imagining things; she’s been hanging out with him more and more recently, and she’s yet to see him get flush outside of a beer buzz. “I don’t mind, honestly. I enjoy spending time with you.”

“Well,” she says after a moment, biting her lip to try and contain a smile, turning back to look out the window. “Always nice to know, I suppose.” When she glances back towards him, that’s-- oh yes, that’s definitely a blush. It’s light, and he’s better at schooling his expressions than she is, but it’s still there, obvious enough for her to tell, and clearly he knows it because he’s still staring straight ahead, pointedly not looking at her. “Where to then, darling?”

\-------

(Percy says stuff like this, sometimes. It’s usually followed up by some sort of self-deprecating joke about not having many friends, or trying to stay in good favor with the ones he’s got, or a vague little insight suggesting that he spent most of his childhood and teenage years without much friendly company.

Lately, he’s been leaving those secondary comments off.

Vex still isn’t sure who this Cass person is that she’d heard him speaking to on the phone that night outside the bar. She’s still not sure what their relationship is, what the context of that conversation was. She’s got questions, curiosities. Suspicions. She’s doesn’t know whether or not she’s entitled to answers.

Eventually, if they continue spending time together the way they have been lately, if they continue getting closer, that’s a conversation that they’re going to have to have.

Vex is not her brother. She’s not willing to ignore conflict, to pretend that it’s not there. Problems don’t go away just because you’re not looking at them.)

\-------

“It has occurred to me suddenly,” Percy says thoughtfully, tapping his spoon against the lip of his cup, “that we actually know very little about each other.”

Vex blinks in surprise, then lifts her coffee (dark roast, one sugar, no cream, and Percy had grimaced at it; she’s sure she’d worn a similar expression when he’d poured enough sweetener into his own to put a bull elephant into a sugar coma) up to take a sip as she considers her response. That’s-- well, that’s rather more forward than she was expecting, considering how closely the both of them have been playing things to their chests up to this point.

Slowly, almost hesitantly, she replies, “I’d… sort of been under the assumption that that was on purpose. I’m not--” She pauses, takes another drink, brows furrowing as she thinks. Percy watches with surprising patience, raising his own cup as he waits. “I’m not in the habit of divulging personal information in general. It’s nothing against you,” she hurries to explain, “I just-- I’m not the best at-- at opening up, I guess.”

“Fair enough,” Percy says mildly, taking another sip of his coffee. “Though I was more referring to basic things, not whatever dark secrets you may or may not have. For instance, I’ve always been very curious as to where you got the name _Trinket_ from.”

Vex lets out a startled laugh, drawing the attention of the other cafe patrons to them briefly.

The place that Percy chose is small, cozy almost, on the outskirts of town. It’s not too terribly far from Keyleth’s shop, actually, and Vex thinks that a few of the planters hanging from the windows might have come from Druid Craft. “I’ve never been here before,” he’d said as they’d parked, “but I’ve heard good things.”

The specialty seems to be chicken and waffles, which Vex has personally never had and which Percy looks a little suspicious of, but it’s decent enough and fairly cheap for the amount of food they’re given, and there’s only a few other people there, the breakfast rush having passed and it being not quite time for lunch. _Mordenkainen’s_ , it’s called, which Vex thinks is a name whose complexity is surpassed only by Percy’s.

“Let’s do an, ah-- what does Allura call it again? An exercise.” Percy leans back in his chair, and when one of his legs crosses over his knee beneath the table it brushes her briefly. “We do it sometimes in group. We take turns telling each other a truth.”

“Sounds like a slumber party game,” Vex says, smirking as she spears a piece of chicken on her fork and gestures at him with it. “Do you also braid each other's hair and paint your nails and talk about boys?”

“Only every other session,” he replies without missing a beat. “I’m partial to purple polish but it keeps chipping and rubbing off when I get grease on myself.” She laughs again, surprised, and he smiles for a moment before continuing, serious but not too intense for it, “But really, it’s a nice way to learn new things about someone. You tell me something, whatever you want, and I’ll take it at face value and ask no questions. Then I tell you something, and you do the same for me.”

“I shudder to think of what you’ve learned about my brother,” she sniggers, taking a bite of her food.

She promptly chokes on it when he says, “Apparently he occasionally wears women’s underwear? Though he didn’t elaborate and we’re not allowed to ask questions, so. Are you quite alright, darling?” She waves him away, coughing into a fist as her eyes water.

Percy watches her, smirking, as she clears her throat several times and takes a great gulp of coffee, then wipes at her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Holy shit,” she says finally. “I didn’t need to know that.”

“Neither did I,” he says, agreeably, “and yet now we both do.”

After nearly a minute of her trying to catch her breath, she takes one more sip and then glances back up at him. His expression is warm, amused, nonjudgmental. “Face value?” she asks, setting her drink down and crossing her arms. “No questions asked?”

“Face value,” he confirms, mirroring her pose. His knee nudges against hers again, his face not giving away any indication on if it may be purposeful or accidental. “No questions asked.”

She stares at him, hard, before finally saying, “My brother picked up his share of poorly-earned trinkets over the course of our lives, I figured it’d only be fair to get one of my own.”

“Poorly earned?” he asks, curious, then immediately raises his hands apologetically when she points an accusing finger at him.

“You said no questions!” she says sharply, but the laugh that comes out with the admonishment lessens the effect somewhat. “That’s a strike against you, then.”

“Strikes?” He blinks at her, incredulous. “I didn’t say anything about strikes. There are no strikes.”

“There are now. Three and you’re out, Percival.”

“Oh, balls,” he huffs, crossing his arms once more, and then thinking for a long moment. “Hmm. Oh, here we are. Related, I suppose; we never had pets in my family growing up because my younger brother Ludwig had terrible allergies to literally everything.”

Vex opens her mouth instinctively, about to ask how many siblings he has, but Percy raises his eyebrows at her expectantly, head tilted to the side as if daring her to speak, and she purses her lips together forcefully.

“Alright, here’s a simple one,” she says after taking another sip of her drink. “My favorite color is blue.”

“I’d have never guessed,” he replies drolly, looking pointedly at her outfit. (Light blue plaid over shirt with a dark blue tank top underneath it. Blue jeans. Vex really likes blue, okay?) When she points her finger at him again he says defensively, “That wasn’t a question! It was a comment. I _commented_ , which is absolutely not against the rules. Mine is purple.”

“Obviously,” she says with a smirk. “Why else would you paint your nails that color?”

“Ah, a strike against you, Vex’ahlia,” he says loftily, taking a sip of his coffee with his goddamn pinky out like a ponce.

“Bullshit!” she laughs, more at his reaction than anything else. “That doesn’t count!”

“It was a question, and therefore it counts.”

Vex laughs harder, and a few more people turn to look at them once again, but Percy doesn’t seem too care about the attention that much, so really, who the fuck cares?

\-------

(Vex collects scarves. Percy likes ascots, which is hilarious.

Vex has a secret addiction to Halo. Percy was a founding member of his high school’s chess club.

Vex can play the first ten seconds of Fur Elise on the piano, which is the extent of her musical talent. Percy, surprisingly, is a big fan of Pearl Jam.

Vex’s mom died of cancer. Both of Percy’s parents are dead.

She almost dropped out of high school. He did drop out of college.

In the end, after they’ve reached the extent of what they’re willing to share, they both sit quietly, contemplatively, but the silence is comfortable, companionable, a surprising lightness to Vex’s heart despite the fact that normally she’s loathe to share any sort of personal information. She’s got two strikes and he’s already collected more than three but only because towards the end she got strike-happy, and it doesn’t matter anyway, she doesn’t actually hold it against him. There’s no mention of romance, or relationships, on either side. Percy says nothing about Cass. Vex tries not to think about it too much.

It’s fascinating, actually; she hadn’t realized quite to the extent at which you can know so much about someone, and yet not really know them at all.)

\-------

((“How often does this devolve into just random tales of sexual conquests?” she asks.

“Another strike. Sexual conquests, not often. Sex in general? Well, how do you think I found out about Vax’s lady underwear?”

“Two strikes!”))

\-------

“Alright, so we’ve actually already gone to all the lots on the list,” Percy says once they’ve climbed back up into his truck, stomachs full of the interesting combination of chicken and waffles. “But we’ve got one more Craigslist seller to check out if you’re up for it.”

“Percival, at this point if I can find something that’s not going to explode as soon as I crank it up, I’ll settle for that.”

“Well I won’t,” he says with a frown, pulling back onto the highway. “It’s only like twenty minutes outside of town, we’ll take a look and if it’s not up to snuff we’ll wait another week and see if anything better pops up. Here.” He hands her his phone, a blank message with a number she doesn’t recognize already inputted in as the recipient. “That’s the guy, tell him we’re on our way, if you’d be so kind.”

“If you insist,” she says with a sigh, secretly delighted by his concern. It’s-- god, but it’s dangerous territory she’s getting into, spending time with him. He’s too much like something she could get used to.

Twenty minutes ends up being more like forty, because they get lost in the country back roads but he refuses to admit it, which is its own sort of hilarity, the way he leans forward in his seat to squint at road signs as they pass, grumbling quietly under his breath whenever it’s not the one he’s looking for. When they finally make it to their destination, they pull off onto a dirt road and up a gravel driveway, and there’s a man waiting for them out in the yard, leaning against a Honda Civic.

“Cornelius,” he greets when they’ve climbed out, shaking both their hands. “Howdy.” Then he and Percy both start talking shop, almost entirely ignoring Vex, who rolls her eyes and follows them placidly.

Cornelius is the most obliging salesperson they’ve spoke to yet; he gets under the hood with Percy, helpfully pointing out parts that have been replaced and what’s still original to the car, and Vex tries to follow the conversation but Percy seems pleased to have found someone who knows the technical aspects of it and they quickly leave her in the dust, talking faster than she can keep track of and, frankly, using words and terms that she’s literally never heard before. After about ten minutes of looking back and forth between the two of them talking about carburetors Vex gives up and leans against Percy’s truck, trusting him to know what to look for.

When she takes out her phone, she’s got seven text messages, and with a raised brow she opens them up one by one.

**FR: SCANMAN**  
_hey are you still mad at me_

**FR: VAX**  
_hows the car hunting goin? any luck_

**FR: SCANMAN**  
_hey stop being mad at me_

**FR: SCANMAN**  
_vex_

**FR: SCANMAN**  
_veeeeeeexxxxxxxxx_

**FR: SCANMAN**  
_i have ur dumb dog hostage & idk if u wanna know whatll happen to him if you dont stop being mad at me_

**FR: SCANMAN**  
_jk i dont have ur dumb dog hostage but you should still stop being mad at me_

Vex rolls her head back and stares up at the sky. “Wow.”

“Everything alright?” Percy asks, leaning around the popped hood of the car to blink at her in concern, elbows-deep in the engine, and Cornelius glances between the two of them curiously.

“Scanlan,” she offers in answer, and even though Percy’s only spent a limited amount of time with the other man he seems to understand, nodding with a quiet _ah_ sound before diving back into the bowels of the car.

**TO: SCANMAN**  
_Wow._

**TO: VAX**  
_We’re at the last stop of the day. Percys said no to everything we’ve seen up to this point. Im sort of going with his judgement on this_

Speaking of, Vex watches as the two men climb into the Civic and crank it up, and then talk amongst themselves.

**TO: VAX**  
_I think he might want to make out with the guy we’re talking to rn_

With surprising speed, Vex receives a text in reply.

**FR: VAX**  
_hot_

She snorts, and again Percy looks over at her. She waves him off.

**FR: VAX**  
_wtf they talkin about_

**TO: VAX**  
_Idk cars and shit_

**FR: VAX**  
_lame_

“Ah, Vex?” When she glances up, Percy’s once more climbed out of the vehicle, wiping his hands across the thighs of his jeans. “Everything checks out from what I’ve seen, though I’d have to jack it up to look beneath the carriage to be sure.” Then he looks at Cornelius and shrugs. “No offense.”

“None taken,” the man says, shrugging himself.

Privately, mentally, Vex rolls her eyes.

If she hears one of them say _bro_ even once she is stealing Percy’s truck and running away with it.

“Ya’ll folks are welcome to take her for a test drive,” Cornelius says, gesturing Vex to the driver’s seat, and she thanks him before sliding behind the wheel, Percy climbing into the passenger’s seat beside her.

Vex reaches for the keys, but Percy stops her with a confused noise, reaching out to stop her. “You’ve got to push in on the clutch first, Vex.”

She freezes. Takes a moment to actually inspect the inside of the car. Turns to look at Percy.

“Percival, I don’t know how to drive a stick.”

He stares back at her for a second, then nods. “Ah.” He takes a deep, thoughtful breath, then says succinctly, “Well, shit.”

\-------

Okay, so here’s another secret that Vex has.

(Don’t worry, this one is a lot less dark.)

Jarett actually did try to teach her how to drive a stick shift once.

This is a secret only because it’s incredibly embarrassing and if Vax ever found out he’d laugh himself into an early grave. Basically, they were in a Lowes parking lot at three in the morning and they were maybe a little drunk. They’d picked a time so early to minimize the risk of civilian casualties; Jarett’s words, not Vex’s, though it ended up being a bit prophetic.

They’d gotten about ten minutes into the lesson, Vex learning all of the different gears and getting a feel for everything. Jarett was being distracting, the dumb sexy bastard, and honestly she was a little buzzed and not wholly paying attention. She’d turned the car on by herself, which was awesome, and Jarett had rewarded her for it with-- well, she won’t get into that. Anyway, she’d cranked it up and then gotten distracted, and by the time she’d moved the gearshift into reverse she’d forgotten that she shouldn’t let up the whole way off the clutch.

As you can surely imagine, the car shot backwards a good twenty yards, Vex and Jarett screaming the whole way, until he had the sense to yank up on the parking brake. The car had immediately stalled, of course, and Vex had promptly climbed out of the car, laughing hysterically the way she occasionally does when incredibly stressed or nervous, got back into her car, and left Jarett in the parking lot to drive to Waffle House and eat a bunch of chocolate chip waffles while a few truckers stared at her, disconcerted.

Since then, riding with anyone in a manual car has given her an almost Pavlovian craving for waffles.

\-------

("Alright, alright, now just-- just let up gently, _gently!_ There you go, darling, now give it a bit more go. Shit! Well, not that much."

"Oh, _fuck me_."

"No, no, we've got this. First gear is always the hardest part, once you get moving it's easier. Lift off the clutch slowly, and press in on the gas. Maybe not that slow--"

"We stalled again."

"I'm aware. It's alright, we're learning. This is a learning experience."

"Jesus. Oh, _hell_ , I am so sorry, Percy."

"It's fine, honestly, it's fine. Everybody learns sometime. There you go! Let off the break and just let it roll, clutch down, shift gear."

"Holy fuck, lookit that! I didn't stall! Fuck, nevermind."

"Ah, Vex, you're-- you're pressing the gas and the break at the same time, not the clutch."

"Mother fucking _ballsack_ son of a _bitch-ass_ piece of garbage!"

"Indeed. Does Vax know how to drive stick?"

"Percival, my brother's main form of transportation is a six-speed Huffy with a basket on the handles so he can bring flowers home."

"Ah, yes, sorry, I'd forgotten. Oh, for god's sake-- _just go around, you prick!_ "

"He flipped us off!"

"I don't care, he drives a Tundra, clearly he's compensating for something. Now, lift up, press the gas, shift into first."

"Ah! There we go! I did it!"

"Yes you did! Watch the RPM, and... shift now. Yes!"

"Awesome! High five! Ha ha. Cornelius was pretty cool about me using his car to practice."

"Eh, honestly I was sort of getting the impression that he just wants to get rid of it. His younger brother left it here when he went to college, apparently."

"You think I should get it?"

"Make sure to push the clutch all the way-- there you go, dear, you're a natural. _Eh_. I think it's in the best shape for the asking price that we've seen. Relatively low miles for its age. Now that you've got the basics down driving a manual shouldn't be too terribly difficult with a bit of practice."

"Is it worth what he's asking for, though?"

" _No_ used car is worth what it's asked for."

"I'll haggle it down then."

"Ah, Vex.."

"No, no, listen. You've worked your mechanical magic. Now watch while I work my _money_ magic."

"I can't wait."

"Awesome. Hey, after this, how do you feel about waffles?"

"...we've already had waffles today, Vex."

"Ah. Right. Nevermind, then.")

\-------

"This was an eventful day," Percy says cheerfully as they drive back into town, heading towards Vex and Vax's apartment. By this point the sun has started setting, and Vex is... almost sad, sort of, that the day is coming to an end. She's anxious, of course, because-- because she's just agreed to fork over a not insubstantial amount of money for another used car that may or may not shit out on her just like the last one did, but she trusts Percy's judgement more than she trusts her own about this kind of stuff.

It'll have to wait until she can pool together a bit more money, maybe call in a couple favors, do a few more jobs on the side to get some cash under the table, but it's-- it's do-able, it's a completely viable option, it feels nice, it feels _good_ to finally feel like she's getting her life back on track again. The last few years have been so hard, such an uphill battle, and it feels like every inch of ground that she's gained she's had to fight to keep from sliding back.

She hates owing people, absolutely hates it, but damn if she doesn't feel grateful to Percy. He's been... well, probably too much of a help, honestly.

"I'll say," she says finally, sighing and leaning back against the head rest, closing her eyes. She almost wishes Percy's truck was a manual too so she could practice on the way home, but she'll just have to try and remember everything when she goes to pick up the Civic from Cornelius. "I really-- I really appreciate everything you've done, Percy. I'm sorry it took so long to get this done. If I pulled you away from anything important for this--"

"Vex'ahlia, honestly," he says, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, glasses flashing in the reflection of a streetlight. "The only thing I'd have been doing today is sitting around my apartment watching Netflix or reading or something. I don't mind helping at all, and I had a lovely time."

Vex drops her eyes down to her hands, fingers tightening slightly in her lap. The problem is... Jesus, the problem is that she did too, she had a _great_ time, and she can't-- she can't keep _doing_ this to herself. She knew it would happened, she'd warned herself, and just like the fucking car she's got no one else to blame for it, but she _likes_ him goddammit. It's the same thing that happened with Jarett; a guy who's bad news that she knows she should stay away from, and what does she do?

She gets fucking attached.

(And-- and shit, what about Cass? Who the fuck is Cass? This person that he speaks to with such affection and familiarity, who apparently just lets him _flirt_ with someone else, because that's what he's doing, he's _flirting_ with her, she's not a moron she knows that's what it is.)

She swallows, keeps her head down, and says nothing, but Percy doesn't seem to notice her reticence, doesn't seem to find the silence awkward. After a minute or so she-- she turns, opens her mouth to-- to, shit, she doesn't know. Confront him? Ask him to stop? Ask him _not_ to stop? when the quiet inside the car is broken by the sound of a generic ringtone and Percy startles briefly.

It's not Vex's, she knows that. (Vax got ahold of her phone a few months ago and gave everyone customized ringtones, and she does mean _everyone_ , so she usually has no clue who's calling until she's got the phone in front of her, except for her brother whose ringtone she's memorized, which is that dumbass Pon Pon Wei Wei Japanese thing. She'd change it, but. Eh. It's funny.)

Percy fishes his phone out of his pocket, shifting to pull it out, and grimaces slightly when he checks the caller ID. "Ah, sorry, Vex, it's my sister. Hold on a tick." He accepts the call, not paying attention to her incredulous look. How many siblings does he have? "Hello? Cass, can I call you back in half an hour?"

Oh.

Um.

Well.

That sort of changes things, doesn't it?

The dread that had taken hold of her, the worry and anxiety that had sat so heavily on her heart, lifts so suddenly that it's nearly painful, that the breath is halfway knocked out of her, and she only pays the barest amount of attention to Percy's conversation ("I'm with a friend. _No_ , Cass. Cassandra! Honestly."), too busy staring, wide-eyed and blinking, out the window and considering this new development.

Cass, Cassandra, is Percy's sister. That-- that makes sense, sort of, given what she knows of him, puts into perspective the way he'd spoken to her on the phone that night at the bar, the gentle softness in his words. ("I don't have to prove anything to you, you little monster.") His sister. Well. Well well well.

This makes things a lot easier, actually. She sort of, ah. Well, she likes him, doesn't she? She does. She thinks. She's pretty sure. She's interested enough to give it a shot, anyway. And he-- well, it's possible that he is just a friendly person, that everything he's done has just been an honest kindness, but. She kind of doubts it. ("Look, just-- if Archie needs to talk to me then he can call me himself. I know, but now's not the best--") She knows the way men look at her when they want something, when they want _her_ , she's familiar with the look he gets sometimes when his eyes linger just a bit too long on her mouth, the shape of her lips.

A phone is thrust in her direction abruptly and when she looks up, surprised, Percy is staring out the windshield with a pained look on his face.

"Say something to my sister so that she stops saying that I'm lying about having friends," he sighs, sounding a bit embarrassed, but that lightness in her chest sort of bubbles up her throat into genuine laughter and she leans in towards the phone.

"I'm just a figment of his imagination," she says, grinning when Percy makes an offended noise at the back of his throat and snatches the phone back.

"Rude!" he accuses, and on the other line Vex can just faintly hear laughter, far away and robotic-sounding, tinny from the distance. "She's lying, of course, Cassandra." He glares at her, the upturn of his lips making it obvious that it's in jest. "But truly, I _will_ call you back just as soon as I get home. Alright? I love you, too." And then he hangs up and laughs, a little nervously, shifting his shoulders and drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. "Sorry about that."

"Don't be," Vex says, and when they pull to a stop at a red light, she twists, leaning forward without warning, and kisses him square on the mouth.

Percy jolts, inhaling sharply through his nose in surprise, one hand jerking off of the steering wheel and hanging, fingers flexing, in the air between them. "Oh," he says after she leans back, clearing her throat and licking her lips, suddenly very unsure about the decision that she'd just made. "Oh, well. If _that's_ how we're playing it."

The hand that he'd lifted off the wheel reaches out, snags around her shoulder and reels her back in, and this time _she's_ surprised by it, the pressure of his mouth against hers, lighter than she'd been expecting, sweeter, almost chaste, as if he's too afraid to presume which is so stupid it's _cute_. His hand curls up into her hair, not pulling or guiding, just holding, and he leans back for a brief moment to rest his forehead against hers.

"This is a very poor decision, for a variety of different reasons," he murmurs, his mouth close enough to hers that his breath is warm on her face.

"Who gives a fuck?" she asks quietly. "I make crap decisions all the time."

He laughs softly and opens his mouth to reply, but then--

A horn honks loudly behind them, startling them both, and upon noticing that the light is green Percy yelps and steps on the gas. The next minute is spent in completely awkward silence, neither of them saying anything or looking at each other, before Vex sighs and rolls her eyes, _hard_.

"Look," she says to the roof of the car. "I sort of like you, I guess."

"That's comforting, I suppose," he mutters with a snort, and without looking she leans over and elbows him in the side.

"I like spending time with you, and-- and I'm happy, usually, when you're around."

After a long moment, he says quietly, "I-- feel rather much the same."

" _So_ ," she continues, drawing the word out, "let's just. Continuing spending time together and, and being happy, I guess, and we'll see where that goes. Yeah?"

He clears his throat, and when she glances over at him she can see even in the dim light cast through the car by passing street lamps that his face and neck are bright red, a blush having apparently spread downwards. "That's, ah, agreeable."

"Agreeable," she mocks, huffing, and he looks at her, briefly, just a short glance before his eyes go back to the road. They're getting close to her apartment now, and they'll have to wrap up the conversation soon. She's no doubt that her brother is waiting up for her for details of the day.

"I would rather like that," he amends after a moment, a slight hesitation that catches her attention, but she doesn't comment on it; Percy is entitled to his own doubts, she supposes.

"Good," she says.

"Good," he agrees.

Another long silence, and then when she starts giggling he joins her, nervously, anxiously, but there's a happiness to it, a hopefulness, one that she hasn't felt in, god. Years? Not since Jarett, at least. Not since things were simpler. Things aren't simple now, but... god.

Isn't the point of trying to make life better is that it actually gets _better?_

When they reach her apartment, pulling up into the parking lot and coming to a stop beside Gilmore's purple BMW (he must be staying late, the lights are on in the shop below the apartment), she leans over again, this time telegraphing her intentions obviously, and when she kisses him for the third time he closes his eyes. It's a simple thing, a gentle one, more of a test than anything, but it's a good one for all that it lacks a certain heat that she'd been expecting. When she pulls away Percy looses a deep breath.

"Very agreeable," he says, and she ducks her head away, letting her hair fall in her face briefly to cover her smirk.

"I'd invite you up to finish the conversation, but..." She glances out the window and sees that the lights are on in her own apartment, and sure enough within a couple seconds she sees the curtains to the kitchen window move and Vax's face peeks out at them.

"I'll take a rain check, I think," he says, sounding a bit nervous, and letting out another breath when Vax disappears back into the kitchen and away from the window. When he looks back at her, she bites her lip, unsure of how to-- to go about doing this, what the protocol should be. She's never actually wanted to, like, _date_ someone, all the relationships she's been in have been more like friends with benefits that she's just sort of fallen into, but she feels like something like that wouldn't fly with Percy, and besides, for once that's not what she wants.

She wants...

God, she just wants something _good_ for once.

Doesn't she deserve that by now?

"I'll text you, I guess," she says, unbuckling her seat belt and fiddling with the handle to the door.

"I look forward to it," he replies, and after the two of them stare at each other for a moment he smiles, brighter than she was expecting, the widening of his eyes suggesting that maybe he wasn't expecting it either. "I really do! Huh. That's interesting. I really, really do look forward to it, Vex'ahlia."

She grins back, a bit giddily, and when she gets out of the truck and shuts the door behind her, she pretends not to notice the fist pump motion he makes to himself as he drives away.

\-------

("So," Vax says, spooning some Lucky Charms into his mouth.

Vex walks into the apartment and closes the door, leaning back against it as Trinket bounds towards her, wagging and smiling, his jowls shaking as he wiggles about her legs and sniffs at her. "So," she says, not looking him in the eye. "I might have a car, if I can come up with some extra cash."

"That's nice," Vax says mildly, and with a loud slurp. Some of the milk drips down onto his shirt, which is the Grumpy Cat one that Scanlan gave him on their birthday. (Her present was a shirt that said in bold letters, "I LIKE BIG MUTTS AND I CANNOT LIE." She'd said it was stupid but had secretly loved it until, ironically, Trinket tore it up out of spite because she'd taken away his Kong when he'd tried to eat it.) He doesn't seem to notice; his expression is serene but his eyes are sharp and staring at her. "How's Percy."

"He's fine," she says, casually taking off her over shirt and throwing it over the back of the couch.

"Anything else _interesting_ happen that I should know about, sister dear?" he asks, tracking her progress through the apartment critically, tapping his spoon loudly against the bottom of his bowl. "Any secrets you might be keeping about today?"

"I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about," she says breezily, shutting her bedroom door behind her as she goes to change into her pajamas. Vax opens the door without warning, still holding his bowl of cereal as he glares at her. She pauses for only a moment before continuing to undress.

Whatever. It's nothing he hasn't seen before.

"What were you and Percival talking about in the truck just now? You two seemed to be sitting pretty close. Looked nice and cozy. Must have been a good conversation." He leans against the door frame, weight on his hip, hair loose about his shoulders and spoon sticking out of his mouth, lips frowning around it.

"Well it certainly wasn't about you wearing women's underwear," she hums as she tugs on some sweats, and grins to herself when she hears him choke on the spoon.)

\-------

Here is what Vex doesn't talk about:

By the time she gets back to their apartment, it's nearly eight in the morning. At this point she's been awake for almost a full twenty-four hours, and she's been walking for the last three. Everything aches. Her legs. Her feet. Her stomach. Her heart.

The night doorman is just ending his shift and he raises his eyebrow at her when he sees her shamble into the lobby. It's always-- this building has always seemed to much like a hotel to her, too much like just a stop you take while in transit, and she's so... Oh god, she's so heartsore, she could really just use a fucking home.

"You okay, kid?" he asks, his usual indifference giving way to actual concern as he tracks her slow progress to the elevator.

"No," she answers, leaning her forehead against the doors and almost falling through when they open a few seconds later.

"Hey--" he calls out after her, but by then the doors are shutting and the elevator is moving up, its journey smooth as it climbs the floors.

She should. She should call the police, right? That's what you do when this happens? Maybe go to the hospital? Everything hurts, _everything_ , hours of walking taking a toll on her because she was too stubborn (too scared, too scared, god she was terrified) to flag down another ride and keep hitching, her head hurts from the rush of adrenaline, from crying, from--

Oh god. Everything hurts.

She doesn't call the police and she doesn't go to the hospital. Both of those places will require her to answer questions and she can't, she _can't_ , god she just wants to sleep. She just wants to sleep so badly.

When she opens the door to their apartment, it's quiet, but there's a light on in the kitchen. She tenses and tries to walk to her room carefully, but stops with a wince when her father calls out, "Vex'ahlia?"

She takes a deep breath (it hurts, it hurts, she thinks she may have cracked a rib in the scuffle, or at least bruised it, it _hurts_ ) and then says, "Yes, father?"

"Come here, please."

It's not a request. Father doesn't request things. He demands them, and he words them gently, politely, so that it's your fault if you don't follow through with his demands. She has learned this from him, perhaps the only thing he's ever actually taught her; how to say something without speaking it, how to hide meanings in her words. He is crafty, and she is learning from him how to be craftier.

It's not necessarily a kind lesson.

She listens though, because there are consequences when she doesn't. This is not home, it's not-- not comfortable, but it is a place to lay her head and her bed calls out for her, she's so _tired_ , but she goes to the kitchen and leans against the doorway, trying to look like she hasn't just scrapped with two adult men and then walked several hours in the dark.

"Where've you been?" Father asks, eyes not leaving the newspaper spread out before him. He lifts his coffee to his lips and sips from it soundlessly, looking for all the world like he's not even aware of her presence.

It's fine. She's used to that.

"Out," she says.

Father hums quietly, turns a page of his newspaper. One of his eyebrows raises at whatever headline he's reading. "Getting into trouble again?" Before she can answer, he continues, "I'm not sure why I bother asking, of course you are. Where's your brother?"

She blinks in confusion, shifts her weight to relieve some ache. "I don't know. He's not here?"

Father hums again, and when he speaks his voice is soft, quiet, almost gentle but for the layer of steel beneath the words. "No, he is not, and if I find out that he's out doing something _foolish_ again and you're lying to cover him the results will not be pretty." Finally he looks up at her, his eyes dark brown, like Vax's eyes, like her eyes, and she's so, so _tired_ and she just wants to go lay down and cry and not be interrogated by her own fucking _father_.

"I don't know where he is," she says again, closing her eyes against the stinging, swallowing hard. She will not cry in front of him. She will not. She is tired of-- of crying in front of men.

His eyes are hard and they linger on her for a moment, taking in her stance, her bruises, the way one hand has protectively clasped around her middle without her realizing it, the dark circles under her eyes. When he speaks again his voice is still mild, but still mean, and he says, "I think the two of you would do well to remember that I took you in out of the kindness of my heart without asking anything in return. Next time you make," he pauses, thinks on his words for a moment. "...rash decisions, perhaps you should first consider what the alternative could have been."

Vex knows her father, and she knows threats. She's. She's already heard several of them tonight. On a normal day she'd rail back. She'd call him on his bluff. There's nowhere he can send them that wouldn't look bad on him, no clean way to get rid of the twins that wouldn't get around in his social circles. He's stuck with them now, just as they are with him, but she's tried, she's so goddamn tired, and she doesn't have the energy to fight.

She nods, swallowing hard again, and he holds her gaze for another few seconds before shaking out his newspaper and returning his attention to that. Sensing a clear dismissal, Vex retreats to her room, and she's already sobbing quietly by the time she gets there and shuts the door behind her. Vax's bed is empty, unmade, and normally that wouldn't matter, she'd crawl into it anyway, wrap herself up in his sheet and cry into his pillow and surround herself with the scent and feeling of her twin, but not today, not today, today she collapses into her own bed and wails, she's so _stupid_ , she makes such _poor decisions_ , she has too much _trust_.

(When she wakes up a few hours later, she hears her father and Vax shouting at each other in the other room, from behind the door, and she lays in her bed, staring numbly at the wall, and thinks to herself, no more. No more trust.

It's never gotten her anywhere good, anyway.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the record i have driven a manual car exactly one time and i gave up within five minutes because i'm a quitter so any and all knowledge i have of driving a stick is derived from youtube videos that i've watched solely for the purpose of this fic. if there are any inaccuracies, which is likely, then that's really unfortunate and i probably won't correct them.


End file.
